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A COUNTRY BOY’S VISION OF CITY LIFE 










«j M? 

THE it? 

Strenuous Career :ff 


SHORT STEPS TO SUCCESS 


Rev. Madison C. Peters 


NUGGETS OF WISDOM 


Advice to the Young, Problems of Life, Success and Failure, 
Examples of Great Men, Keen and Witty Sayings and 
Many Important Subjects of Paramount Interest 
to Boys and Men, Whether Country or City- 
bred, Revealing to the Ambitious 
Man or Boy the Secrets of 
Success and the Vic¬ 
tories of Life. 


FORTITER 

FIDEUTER 

.FEIICITER 


CHICAGO: 

LAIRD & LEE, Publishers 








LIBRARY of OONG?iES3^ 

Two Copies KeceiyeC; 

MAY 27 1908 

Copy<!£ni entry 

*1 

GLASJ» A Me, No. i 

%o 1 6*1 7 

COPY B. 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1908 , 
By William H. Lee, 
in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at 
Washington, D. C. 










CONTENTS 


I. 

Getting on the Right Track, 


PAGE 

7 

II. 

The Age of the Trained Man, . 


14 

III. 

The Genius of Energy, . 


20 

IV. 

Enthusiasm the Driving Power, 


27 

V. 

The Country Boy or the City-bred Man, 

87 

VI. 

Making Difficulties Yield to Enthusiasm, 

49 

VII. 

Poor Boys and Great Men, 


54 

VIII. 

Little Things and Success, 


59 

IX. 

Does a College Education Pay ? 

- . 

66 

X. 

Self-supporting at College, 


75 

XI. 

Luck and Pluck, 


83 

XII. 

Health and Success, 


89 

XIII. 

Hurry as a Success Killer, 


96 

XIV. 

Worry as a Success Killer, 


104 

XV. 

Drudgery and Success, 


110 

XVI. 

The Victories of Youth, , 


117 

XVII. 

Tact vs. Talent, 


124 

XVIII. 

Keep Your Ideal in Sight, 


133 

XIX. 

Manners and Success,. 


139 

XX. 

Drink and Business, 


145 

XXI. 

Promptness and Success, . 


155 

XXII. 

The Progressive Man, 


163 

XXIII. 

Honesty and Success, , 


170 

XXIV. 

Accuracy and Success, 


180 

XXV. 

Faithfulness and Success, , 


186 

XXVI. 

Backbone, .... 


193 

YXVII. 

The Successful Man’s Wife, 


201 

XXVIII. 

Shakespeare on Success, . 


207 

XXIX. 

Success via the Grand Stand, . 

• 

214 

XXX. 

The Failure of Success, • 

• 

220 

XXXI. 

The Tragedies of Success, 

. 

. 232 






To 

OSCAR , I SID OR and NATHAN 
STRAUS ; of New Tork, 

Three Noble Brothers Who Have Not Only 
Made Money by Square Dealing, but Have 
Found Time to Spend their Energies as 
Well as Their Fortunes in Varied and 
Multiplied Labors in the Noble Cause of 
Humanity and Who Have Made Deir 
Names Honored Throughout the Land; 
To these Fine Examples of Good Success 
This Book is Dedicated 

THE AUTHOR 


CHAPTER I. 

GETTING ON THE RIGHT TRACK. 

James Russell Lowell tells us that “ every 
man is born with his business or profession in 
him, ,, while Sydney Smith long ago said: “Be 
what nature intended you for, and you will suc¬ 
ceed, but be anything else and you will be a 
thousand times worse than nothing.’’ There can 
be no greater mistake than to bend your design 
where your genius does not incline. Emerson 
wisely says that “the crowning fortune of a 
man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit 
which finds him in employment and happiness,” 
while Shakespeare asserts: 

11 To business that we love, we rise betimes, 

And go to it with delight. ’ * 

No man can struggle victoriously against his 
own character and one of the very first lessons 
of life is to learn what groove we are intended to 
fill. 

Evidences of one’s right calling will manifest, 
themselves early in life. Handel, the famous 
composer, whose father was a physician, was in¬ 
tended for the profession of the law, and the 


7 


The Strenuous Career 


father did all he could to discourage the boy’s 
fondness for music, but he got an old spinet and 
practiced on it secretly in a hay-loft; he pro¬ 
duced an opera before he was fifteen. Beethoven 
composed at thirteen, while Mozart gave con¬ 
certs at six. Victor Hugo presented a poem to 
the Academy at fifteen, Goethe wrote at ten, 
Pope at fourteen; at sixteen Bacon had success¬ 
fully pointed out the errors in Aristotle’s philos¬ 
ophy, while Pascal at the same age wrote a treat¬ 
ise on the Conic Sections. Bach used to copy 
whole books of music by moonlight when he was 
meanly denied a candle. Napoleon was at the 
head of armies at ten years of age; at this time, 
when a student at Brienne, writing to his mother, 
he said: “With Homer in my pocket and my 
sword by my side, I hope to fight my way 
through the world. ’ ’ Murillo, the famous Span¬ 
ish artist, filled the margins of his schoolbooks 
with drawings. Michel Angelo, whose parents 
punished him for covering the walls with 
sketches, declared he was no son of theirs 
should he become an artist, spent whole nights 
copying drawings by moonlight which he dared 
not bring home. Galileo, who discovered the 
principle of the pendulum at eighteen and in¬ 
vented both the microscope and the telescope, 
was set apart by his parents for a physician, 


8 



GETTING ON THE RIGHT TRACK. 

HANDEL PRACTICING ON A SPINET IN HIS FATHER’S HAY LOFT. 































































Getting On the Right Track 


but when compelled to study physiology, he 
would hide his Euclid and secretly work out dif¬ 
ficult problems. Lorraine, the painter, was ap¬ 
prenticed by his parents to a pastry-cook. Ark¬ 
wright’s parents apprenticed him to a barber. 
It is a serious mistake for parents to wish their 
sons to be reproductions of themselves. John 
Jacob Astor’s father wanted to make a butcher 
of his boy, but the commercial instinct was 
strong enough in him to make him run away 
from home and come to America. 

Father, don’t try to make that boy another 
you,—one of you will do. The father of Daniel 
Webster determined that Daniel should become 
a farmer; he took the boy out into the field, and 
showed him how to cut hay, but no matter how 
the father fixed the scythe, it didn’t hang to suit 
Daniel, until the old man in despair and disgust, 
exclaimed: 4 ‘ Get out of the field and hang that 
scythe to suit yourself. ’ ’ Daniel hung the scythe 
on a tree and said: 1 i Father, there it hangs to 
suit me.” 

Many of the world’s most successful men have 
failed in one or more pursuits before they 
finally got upon the right track. Barnum failed 
in fourteen different occupations before he dis¬ 
covered he was a born showman. Goldsmith 
failed as a physician, but who else could have 


9 


The Strenuous Career 


written “The Deserted Village”? Cromwell 
was a farmer at forty and Grant a tanner at 
thirty-eight. Moody, an indifferent shoe sales¬ 
man, became after middle life the world’s great¬ 
est evangelist. 

Nlo man will ever do his best until he fills his 
proper niche. One of the most mischievous no¬ 
tions that has ever obtained a lodgement in the 
popular mind, is the belief, that a man to be re¬ 
spected must be a doctor, a lawyer or a preacher 
—an idea which has spoiled many good carpen¬ 
ters, done injustice to the anvil and committed 
fraud upon the potato patch. I would rather my 
boy became a shoemaker and put genius in his 
shoes, rather than become a preacher, preaching 
sermons that nobody wants to hear. Many an 
ambitious parent forces a boy to become a doc¬ 
tor or a lawyer when measuring tape and calico 
would have been the fittest thing for him to do, 
while on the contrary, we find men selling dry- 
goods whose skill in hair-splitting, whose adroit¬ 
ness at parry and whose fertility of resource in 
every exigency, show that nature designed them 
for the pulpit or the bar. There are thousands 
of men to-day in the learned professions de¬ 
feated and disappointed, disgusted and dispir¬ 
ited, who might have been successful farmers 
and look upon the farmer’s life with envy and 


10 


Getting On the Right Track 


chagrin, while thousands more who have been 
pitchforked through a course of Latin and 
Greek with college honors thick upon their full 
(fool) heads are reduced to necessities which 
degrade them in their own estimation and are 
humiliated by the wretched compensation which 
accompanies the average professional career. 

All callings in life are alike honorable if they 
are useful There is a world of truth in Pope’s 
familiar lines: 

11 Honor and shame from no condition rise— 

Act well your part, there all the honor lies. ’ * 

The world does not demand that you shall be 
a famous lawyer, a skilled physician, an elo¬ 
quent divine or a merchant prince, but that with 
a noble purpose, a high endeavor and a useful 
end in view you shall make yourself a master in 
your line. If you’re only a bootblack, be the best 
bootblack in town. A lawyer sought to humili¬ 
ate his rival in public by saying,—“You blacked 
my father’s boots once.” “And I did it well,” 
retorted the successful opponent. 

You may know that you have found your 
place, if your work is a pleasure to you; if you 
long for the time to quit, you’re on the wrong 
job; if you go to your work with no more delight 
than you left it, the job belongs to some other 


11 


The Strenuous Career 


man. When you have found your true calling, 
you will not find nature putting any barriers in 
your path of progress. If you have been boring 
away in the same hole for fifteen years without 
striking anything, you have either got too short 
an augur or you are in the wrong hole. As a rule 
few men change their occupations to advantage 
late in life, yet I advise every man to have the 
moral courage to change his occupation until he 
finds the right place. There is a right place for 
everybody. Your talent whatever it may be is 
your call. When you strike water you will find 
use for your fins. It is true that 6 ‘ a rolling stone 
gathers no moss,” but sometimes “a change of 
pasture makes fat calves. ’ ’ 

If you are sure you are in the wrong sphere, 
get on the right track; if you are on the right 
track you will not be wondering whether the 
rails are laid down right,—you will know it by 
the way things run. In the right place you will 
be resourceful, happy and contented, you will 
expand and grow, and be at least comparatively 
successful; you may not make millions in a con¬ 
genial occupation; it is possible to make a for¬ 
tune and still be a failure. 

Money-making is not the highest success,— 
character is success, and there is no other. Did 
Columbus fail because irons bit into his flesh 


12 


Getting On the Right Track 


and neglect into his heart? Did Cromwell fail 
because his bleached bones were hung in chains 
and buried among thieves and murderers? Was 
the gifted musical genius, Mozart, a failure be¬ 
cause he died penniless and sleeps in an un¬ 
known grave? Was Milton a failure,—Milton 
who sat in his blindness and received $50 for his 
immortal epic? 

No true man fails who has lived a life that has 
accomplished its purpose. 


13 


CHAPTEB II. 

THE AGE OF THE TRAINED MAN. 

Once in a great while a man appears like Da 
Vinci, who besides his devotion to painting and 
sculpture, excelled in architecture, engineering 
and mechanics generally, botany, anatomy, 
mathematics and astronomy. He was also a 
poet and a splendid performer on the lyre. But 
the very rareness of such men who acquire an 
immense amount of learning and do different 
kinds of work well are the exception and prove 
the contrary condition to be the rule. 

Goethe said, “ Wherever thou art, be all 
there. ’ ’ Agassiz was asked his opinion touch¬ 
ing the chemical analysis of a plant. He an¬ 
swered: “I know nothing about chemistry.’’ 
He was a naturalist. This is the age of the 
trained man—even specialists have their spe¬ 
cialty. It does not pay to know everything. Only 
sophomores are omniscient. 

The best way to prevent a gun from scatter¬ 
ing is to put in a single shot. Better to be a 
second rate something than a first rate nothing. 
“My father,’’ said a little fellow, bragging 
about his father, “can do almost anything; he is 


14 


The Age of the Trained Man 

a notary public, a druggist, a horse doctor, he 
can pul] teeth, he can preach, he can mend wag¬ 
ons and things, he can play the fiddle and he is 
a jackass at all .trades.” 

The men who have been most successful in 
their callings have been the men of one idea, an 
all-controlling idea, of which they made a hobby 
and which they rode to the mill, to market and 
to meeting—about which they dreamt, talked, 
laughed, wept and prayed. Columbus rode a 
hobby from court to court till he found two 
Jews, Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez, 
enormously rich merchants, who supplied the 
funds needed to fit out Columbus 9 caravels. 
(Isabella did not sell her jewels to fit out Colum¬ 
bus. She had already pawned them to defray 
the wars then devastating her country.) 

Morse was in Washington riding his hobby, 
the telegraph. One day, on leaving a Congress¬ 
man, the representative said to one of his con¬ 
stituents: “What do you think that old fool 
wants me to do. He wants me to help him to get 
a bill through Congress, so as to stretch a wire 
from Baltimore to Washington, so that one fool 
over in Baltimore can talk to another fool over 
here in Washington. ’ * Morse kept on riding his 
hobby until the telegraph encircles the globe and 
makes thought omnipresent. Harvey is distin¬ 
guished for the circulation of the blood and 


15 


The Strenuous Career 


that alone. Arkwright, the cotton gin; Watts, 
the steam engine; Fulton, the steamboat; Jen- 
ner, vaccination; Edison, electricity; Howe, the 
sewing machine; Garibaldi, liberty; Bismarck, 
the unification of Germany; Wendell Phillips, 
the abolition of slavery; Lincoln, emancipation. 

President Hayes said to Major William Mc¬ 
Kinley, on his entrance into Congress, “To 
achieve success and fame you must pursue some 
special line. You must not make a speech on 
every motion offered or bill introduced. You 
must confine yourself to one particular thing; 
become a specialist. Take up some branch of 
legislation and make that your specialty. Why 
not take up the subject of the tariff? Being a 
subject that will not be settled for years to 
come, it offers a great field for study and a 
chance for ultimate fame.” McKinley began 
studying the tariff, became the foremost au¬ 
thority on the subject and the McKinley Tariff 
Bill made William McKinley President of the 
United States. 

The miscellaneous man is well described by 

Praed: Ui s talk is like a stream which runs 

With rapid change from rocks to roses; 

It slips from politics to puns, 

It glides from Mahommet to Moses, 

Beginning with the laws that keep 
The planets in their courses; 

And ending with some precept deep, 
h\)r skinning eels and shoeing horses. 


16 


The Age of the Trained Man 

As with knowledge, so with work. The suc¬ 
cessful worker today is he who singles out from 
a vast number of possible employments some 
specialty, and to that devotes himself thor¬ 
oughly. The specialist does not have to look 
for a job. The job is looking for him. 

America is a poor country for the average 
man. Everything is crowded — downstairs. 
There is room at the top. The men who climb 
to lofty positions over the heads of a hundred 
others are not always men of conspicuous abil¬ 
ity, but availability. The man who knows how 
to take hold of things by the handles has the 
call. 

The secret of most men’s failure is mental 
dissipation, squandering energies upon a dis¬ 
tracting variety of objects, instead of condens¬ 
ing them into one. It is not the diffused elec¬ 
tricity, but the concentrated thunderbolt that 
is terrible in its power. 

Almost any employer will tell you that as a 
rule the best workers in almost every depart¬ 
ment in this country, are largely foreigners who 
in the Old World devoted their early lives to 
learning some one trade and learning it clear 
through. The gunnery that is most successful 
must play continually upon one point. Young’s 
phrase, "Time elaborately thrown away,” ap- 


17 


The Strenuous Career 


plies to the man who attempts to know or do 
everything. There is a busyness which is not 
business. A personal friend said to Lincoln, 
11 Mr President, do you really expect to end this 
war during this administration ? ” “ Gan’t say, 
sir.” “But, Mr. Lincoln, what do you mean 
to do?” “Peg away, sir; peg away; keep peg¬ 
ping away.” And “pegging away” did it. 
Cyrus Field spent thirteen years of anxious 
watchings and ceaseless toil, wandering in the 
forests of New Foundland, in pelting rain, or 
on the deck of ships, on dark, stormy nights, 
alone, far from home, crossing and recrossing 
the ocean fifty times before he at last laid the 
Atlantic Cable. 

Industry is a good quality, but it will never 
win without concentration. The man who dab¬ 
bles in too many things, who scatters himself 
on several lines, divides his purpose, wastes his 
energies, smothers his enthusiasm and usually 
fails. To succeed you must be unanimous with 
yourself. An old German proverb says, “To 
change and to change for the better, are two 
different things.” It is seldom that the most 
brilliant men achieve the highest success, but 
the stickers. Persistency is more effective than 
brilliancy. When President Johnson tried to 
drive Stanton from the Cabinet, Charles Sum- 


18 


The Age of the Trained Man 


ner sent the Secretary this message: ‘ ‘ Stanton, 
stick.” He stack, and the Nation benefited. 

The men at the summit were not pulled into 
their positions. They pushed their way there. 
When Daniel Webster was speaking at Bunker 
Hill, the crowd pressed hard towards the plat¬ 
form, endangering those seated thereon, and 
Webster, seeing their peril, shouted to the 
people, “Keep back!” “It is impossible,” 
cried someone in the crowd. The orator ex¬ 
claimed, “Nothing is impossible at Bunker 
Hill!” And few things are impossible to the 
persevering, invincibly determined American 
man. As Dickens’ friend would have us un¬ 
derstand, “It’s dogged does it.” You must 
carry a thing through if you want to be any¬ 
body or anything. The world admires and 
crowns the determined doer. Like the postage 
stamp—stick till you get there. The only < ‘ good 
time coming” you are justified in hoping for is 
that which you make for yourself. 


19 


CHAPTER III. 


THE GENIUS OF ENERGY. 

Genius is common sense intensified. It is the 
power of making efforts. It is patience. It is 
the talent for hard work. There is no genius 
like the genius of energy. It was neither luck 
nor chance, but sheer hard work which enabled 
all our great men to force their way upward in 
the face of manifold obstructions. Our greatest 
men have been among the least believers in the 
power of genius and were as persevering as the 
successful men of a commoner sort. Of course, 
without original endowment of heart and brain, 
no amount of toil, however well applied, would 
have produced a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Bee¬ 
thoven or a D ’Israeli. 

No man appears to have written with more 
ease than Dickens, yet he said: 4 ‘My own in¬ 
vention or imagination, such as it is, I can most 
truthfully assure you, would never have served 
me as it has, hut for the habit of commonplace, 
humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging atten¬ 
tion.” When requested to read a few selections 
from his writings, he replied that he had not 


20 


The Genius of Energy 


time to prepare himself, as it was his custom 
to read a piece twice daily for six months be¬ 
fore appearing with it in public. 

Bavle said of Meyerbeer: “He has some tal¬ 
ent, but no genius; he lives solitary, working 
fifteen hours a day at music.” Years passed, 
Meyerbeer’s hard work brought out his genius. 
Newton’s mind was of the very highest order; 
his philosophy sought with all-comprehending 
grasp to encircle the universe of God, and yet, 
when asked by what means he had worked out 
his extraordinary discoveries, he modestly an¬ 
swered: “By always thinking upon them.” 
Hayden said of his art: “It consists of taking 
up a subject and pursuing it.” Beethoven’s 
favorite maxim was: “The barriers are not 
erected which can say to aspiring talents and 
industry—thus far and no farther.” Mozart 
said: “Work is my chief pleasure.” Sir Joshua 
Keynolds was such a believer in the force of in¬ 
dustry, that he held “excellence in art, however 
expressed by genius, may be acquired. ’ ’ Titian, 
in his letter to Charles V, said: “I send Your 
Majesty, ‘The Last Supper,’ after working at 
it almost daily for seven years.” The indefati¬ 
gable industry of Lord Brougham, Michel An¬ 
gelo, Arkwright and Jenner are matters of his¬ 
tory. Lord Chesterfield, who acquired a polish 


21 


The Strenuous Career 


of style, for many years wrote down every bril¬ 
liant passage he met with in his reading. Ly¬ 
man Beecher’s greatest sermon was on the 
“Government of God,” when asked as he des¬ 
cended the pulpit steps, how long it took him to 
prepare that sermon, replied: “About forty 
years, sir.” 

Why is it that the busiest men seem to be in 
demand for everything, and have time for ev¬ 
erything? It is because they have trained them¬ 
selves never to leave their time unemployed. 
Success is ever on the side of the “hustler” as 
winds and waves are ever on the side of the best 
navigator. In this lightning-footed twentieth 
century, things no longer come to him who 
waits, but to him who hustles while he waits. 

We are bringing up in America a numerous 
train of gentlemen idlers, who are passing down 
the stream of life at the expense of their fellow- 
passengers. There are plenty of fellows about 
who live off the earnings of their fathers until 
they can find a girl who is fool enough to marry 
them, then they will live otf her father. By 
borrowing and sponging they manage to live 
well, dress well, often passing for years, elud¬ 
ing the police, and by keeping up fashionable 
appearances are often received in polite circles 
and walk rough-shod over many a worthy young 


22 


The Genius of Energy 

man who has too much good sense to make a 
dash or imitate the monkey-shines of the itin¬ 
erant dude. 

I want to impress on your mind the fact that 
idleness from choice is both destructive and dis¬ 
graceful, and I want you to take home to your¬ 
self what I say. Don’t try to persuade yourself 
that the cap does not fit you. Honestly acknowl¬ 
edge its fitness; it will be a great point gained 
to become honest with yourself. 

God made men and women, too, for employ¬ 
ment, Employment makes the man in a very 
great measure. It is not careful moral training, 
neither sound instruction nor good society, that 
makes men. These are means, but back of these 
lies the moulding influence of a man’s life, and 
that is employment, A man’s business makes 
him,—it hardens his muscle, strengthens his 
body, quickens his blood, sharpens his mind, 
corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive 
genius, puts his wits to work, arouses ambition, 
makes him feel that he is a man, and must show 
himself a man by taking a man’s part in life. 

One hundred and fifty pounds, more or less, 
of good bone and muscle does not make a man; 
a cranium packed with brains does not make a 
man. The body, muscle and brain must act a 
man’s part, do a man’s work, think a man’s 


23 


The Strenuous Career 


thoughts, and bear a man’s weight of character 
and duty, before they constitute a man. You 
can put clothes on a statue and it appears to be 
a human being, but to be a man and appear to 
be are two very different things. Human beings 
grow,—men are made. We have gentlemen 
loafers about,—gas-bags, air-bubbles, which 
burst and are gone,—masculine grass-hoppers, 
good enough to dance attendance on the butter¬ 
flies of society,—things that, glow and die like 
autumnal insects,—despised and forgotten. 

Idleness never made its way in the world and 
never will. The world does not owe us a living, 
but every man owes the world work. Various 
advertisements in our papers are frequently 
thrown out as baits for the gullible. One which 
has lately gone the rounds promised a i ‘sure 
cure for drunkenness on receipt of one dollar.” 
In return, the sender of the cash was told to 
“sign the pledge and keep it.” An investment 
in postage stamps brought the information that 
“the best way to raise turnips” was to “take 
hold of the tops and pull.” Another facetious 
swindler advertised that for the sum of one dol¬ 
lar he would give the secret of increasing money 
four-fold; his reply to his artless dupes was, 
“Take a dollar bill, double it twice and when 
you open it out you will find it in creases four- 


24 


The Genius of Energy 


fold . 9 9 But the one that must have added insult 
to injury, was the answer returned to inquiries, 
on receipt of one dollar, as to how “to make 
money without work,”—namely, “Fish for 
suckers as we do . 9 9 

Some men succeed by great talent, some by 
the influence of others, but the majority by com¬ 
mencing life without; a dollar. Cunard found 
his opportunity for the greatest steamship line 
in the world in a jack-knife and a piece of wood, 
from which he whittled a model. Abraham Lin¬ 
coln found his opportunity in borrowed books 
which he read at night. Galileo saw his in bits 
of glass with which he made great discoveries. 

We are living in a fast age. Everybody is in 
a hurry. Everything is made to sell. Buildings 
go up in a day and sometimes come down as 
quickly. Our thinking is done for us. Our 
problems are all worked out in explanations. 
We get diplomas by correspondence. Many of 
our universities are getting rich “by degrees.” 
The papers give us our politics. People take 
their religion ready-made. Self-help is old- 
fashioned. 

Luck waits for something to turn up. Pluck 
turns up something. Good luck is a man with 
his sleeves rolled up, hard at work. Bad luck 
is a man with his hands in his pockets waiting 
to see how things will turn out. 


25 


The Strenuous Career 


Don’t demoralize your character by doing 
poor work. Poor work may mean only a money 
loss to your employer, but to you it means loss 
of character, self-respect and manhood. 

Suppose you get only ten dollars a week and 
are worth fifty,—shall you just earn the ten 
dollars? Men who say that never advance. 
Don’t worry about your salary. Increase your 
skill. Salaries are raised to meet the growing 
value of men who are earning more than they 
get. The men who advance are not those who 
are careful to do only that for which they are 
paid. In the long run the cream will get to the 
top in any establishment. 


20 


CHAPTER IV. 

ENTHUSIASM THE DRIVING POWER. 

Madame de Stael says,—“The sense of this 
word (enthusiasm) among the Greeks affords 
the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies 
‘God in us.’ ” 

It is this spirit that urges men to do and dare, 
that makes them forget the narrow importance 
of self, and renders them proof against the 
taunts and jibes and ridicule of a scoffing world; 
it leads them on over obstacles and difficulties, 
past the threatening ghouls of envy and hatred, 
and points the way to the shining land of brave 
deeds well done, that lies beyond the river of 
endeavor. 

It is the breath that animates the body with 
the vital essence of its being, giving it force to 
move onward and upward to fulfill the destiny 
of its creation. Without it man is but a piece 
of soulless clay, a mere automaton of flesh and 
blood and bone, moved only by the animal in¬ 
stincts of nature and with no distinguishing 
characteristic to show his superiority to the rest 
of the creation. 


27 


The Strenuous Career 


Nothing great could ever have been accom¬ 
plished in the history of the race had it not been 
for the power that drove men on to accomplish¬ 
ment, The world would have remained in the 
barbarity of darkness and ignorance, at a stand¬ 
still as far as progress and civilization were 
concerned. It was this divine essence in the soul 
that led primitive man from his crude state and 
enabled him to advance step by step into the 
broad light of knowledge and religion. It was 
this that made the pioneer go out to unknown 
lands and explore their secrets; it was this that 
sent men down to the sea in ships in quest of 
adventure; it was this that sent Columbus to 
discover a new world; it was this that impelled 
Stanley to brave the dangers of Darkest Africa, 
and it is this, that today is inciting brave and 
daring souls to go to the uttermost corners of 
the earth, to open them up to commerce and 
trade and kindle the torch of civilization to il¬ 
lumine their savagery. Every great deed, every 
brave deed has enthusiasm behind it. 

The best product of labor is high-minded man 
with enthusiasm for his work. When a task is 
approached in a half-hearted, dead-and-alive 
way, with neither motive nor interest, it will 
never be successfully performed,—the vim, the 
force, the nerve, in a ;word, the enthusiasm 


28 


Enthusiasm the Driving Power 

which enables a man to put the best that is in 
him into his work will be lacking and the result 
will be but an inferior performance. An Irish 
laborer was engaged, in the days before ma¬ 
chinery, to mow some corn with a scythe, and 
before setting out for the work, his employer 
gave him for breakfast a porringer of butter¬ 
milk and a bowl of whey, that is, the milk sep¬ 
arated from the curds. Pat went out to the 
field very discontented, he had no enthusiasm 
for his work on such a breakfast, so he made 
each slow swing of his scythe keep in corre¬ 
spondingly slow rythm and time to the slow re¬ 
frain of this doggerel: 

Buttermilk and whey, 

Faint all day— 

Buttermilk and whey, 

Faint all day— 

With every swing he kept up the rhyme until 
the close of the day. His master coming out to 
view the work found but little corn cut, and sus¬ 
pecting the reason, next morning he had placed 
before Pat a huge platter of bacon and eggs 
with the finest bread and coffee. That day the 
scythe flew to the quickened time of: 

Bacon and eggs, 

Take care of your legs— 

Bacon and eggs, 

Take care of your legs— 


29 


The Strenuous Career 


and so on to nightfall, when there was at least 
ten times as much corn cut as on the preceding 
day. The bacon and eggs made Pat go at his 
work with enthusiasm, hence the result. 

Enthusiasm is a glowing fire, the heat of 
which warms the heart and kindles in the soul 
noble impulses to worthy actions. It has burned 
for every successful man, diffusing its genial 
rays around his path, lighting the way to a life 
of doing and construction, of honest effort and 
faithful performance. There is an energy in 
every one, but it will lie latent, dormant until 
kindled into life by this sacred fire of enthusi¬ 
asm, and then it becomes a mighty force, a giant 
power that nothing can withstand. Energy is 
the lever that can raise the world, but enthusi¬ 
asm is the fulcrum. 

Other things begin equal the degree of enthu¬ 
siasm in any man is the precise measure of his 
conquering power. Take two men of almost 
similar endowments and with equal opportuni¬ 
ties, but the one apathetic, careless, indifferent, 
the other alert, watchful, enthusiastic, and you 
will find that while the latter is steadily climbing 
the heights of success, the other is down in the 
valley bemoaning his fate and attributing his 
hard fortune to the fickleness of luck, which is 
an unknown quantity. 


30 


Enthusiasm the Driving Power 

Without enthusiasm in your work, you lose 
before you start. As genius borders on insan¬ 
ity, so enthusiasm borders on rashness. In the 
outburst of enthusiasm the soul reveals its mas¬ 
terful power. 

Before the time of railroads, in crossing the 
continent, the soldiers had to make use of mule 
trains and on their marches were very much 
endangered by the attacks of hostile Indians 
who ambushed behind rocks and in gullies and 
in other places from which they could make a 
quick onslaught. On one of these occasions a 
mountain howitzer was lashed to the back of a 
mule, and so sudden was the attack of the In¬ 
dians that there was no time to unlimber the 
gun and place it in proper position, so the cap¬ 
tain, suddenly whirling the mule around, 
touched the fuse and let the Red-Skins have the 
charge from the mule’s back; the recoil from 
the cannon, of course, sent the mule spinning, 
and over and over went mule and gun, down 
the declivity towards the Indians who took to 
flight. The old chief was captured, however, 
and when asked why he had run away, when he 
and his party might have captured the entire 
band of pale-faces, he grunted out: “Me big 
Injun; me no afraid of big guns, but when white 
men fire whole mule at Injun, me don’t know 
what come next.” 


31 


The Strenuous Career 


It is enthusiasm that counts in the serried 
ranks when the war-drum heats to battle. It is 
the quality that calls forth the stuff of which 
heroes are made and makes men rush to the can¬ 
non’s mouth to court danger and death. When 
the shout rises from a thousand throats along 
the lines, it sends a shiver to the heart of the 
enemy and instills a fear into their souls which 
does more to defeat them than shot and shell. 
On the Hill of San Juan it was the shout and en¬ 
thusiasm of Roosevelt that cheered his brave 
boys on to the charge and gained the victory. A 
timid attack is equivalent to a nascent defeat. 

And in no matter what direction employed the 
daring spirit of enthusiasm will not allow itself 
to be left behind, but will exert its strength to 
force itself to the front. 

When impelled by enthusiasm men carry their 
work to the highest point of material success. 
As the tide will not allow anything to stem its 
flow, neither will enthusiasm let any opposition 
overcome it, every barrier is broken down, un¬ 
til the end is reached, the summit gained, the 
desire realized, the ambition attained. 

To a man sneering at excitement, a Western 
editor pithily remarked, “ There is only one 
thing can be done in this world without enthu¬ 
siasm and that is to rot.” 


32 



ENTHUSIASM THE DRIVING-POWER. 

(ROOSEVELT AT SAN JUAN HILL.) 






















Enthusiasm the Driving Power 

Always keep your powder dry, ready to go 
off at any moment with explosive force. If you 
allow it to get damp, you might as well have 
none, it is worse than useless. 

Never let the sunburst of manhood dim its 
light around you. By vital energy, indomitable 
pluck, persistent perseverance and glowing en¬ 
thusiasm keep the rays ever bright and chase 
the shadows away by love and hope and faith. 
Remember within yourself you have power, and 
all you have to do is call enthusiasm to your aid 
in order to exert it to the best advantage and 
overcome every stumbling-block within your 
path. Interference, prejudice, hatred, even per¬ 
secution will be powerless to affect you if you 
have an enthusiastic spirit. Whipping only 
made Ole Bull’s childhood devotion to his violin 
more absorbing. 

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of all that is 
great. It has led armies to victories, it has 
erected colossal temples and towers, it has chis- 
seled the most perfect of statues, it has painted 
the most beautiful canvases, it has stimulated 
the most sublime endeavors, it has given us the 
choicest gems of poetry, it has ravished our 
souls with the sweetset music and has conferred 
inestimable blessings on the world. Its very 
nature is uplifting, it strengthens the will, gives 


35 


The Strenuous Career 


force to the thought, and nerves the hand until 
what was only a possibility becomes a reality. 
It makes sunshine in the heart and gives the 
elixir of youth to all whom it blesses with its 
happy spirit. In fact it is a divine thing—God 
within us—as the Greeks say, yet it may be cul¬ 
tivated. 

If you do not have it already, get it; life is 
not worth living without it. 

He fails alone who feebly creeps. If your 
feet slip backward and stumble, harder try. If 
fortune plays you false today, it may be true 
tomorrow. Never dread danger, and from you 
it will fly. The real difference between men is 
enthusiastic energy, an invincible determination 
and the spirit that, Mieawber-like, waits for 
something to turn up. Turn up something 
yourself. Have the spirit of the old Indian, 
who, when wrestling with a much-dried venison 
was asked, “Do you like that?” and stolidly re¬ 
plied, “He is my victual and I will like him.” 


36 


CHAPTER V. 

THE COUNTRY BOY VS. THE CITY BRED MAN. 

Those who study the trend of American life 
today are struck by the tendency of the young 
man to migrate to the city and leave the country 
and all its associations behind. There is a fe¬ 
verish desire to see life, and the inexperienced 
youth thinks that life can be seen in its true con¬ 
ception only in the great centres of population; 
he has beautiful day-dreams of the city, of its 
grandeur and glory, of its pleasures and pal¬ 
aces, of its wealth and ease, and so a feeling of 
unrest takes possession of him and his spirit 
becomes so disturbed that all peace forsakes 
his pillow until he separates himself from the 
home-ties and launches his craft on the troubled 
waters of city life, little dreaming of the shal¬ 
lows and quicksands that have wrecked the 
barks of so many other adventurers who put out 
upon that troublous sea. The shore he leaves 
is dull and uninviting, but the perspective land 
ahead is bathed in golden sunshine and its ivory 
gates lie open for all who wish to enter. 

Certainly the city is enticing for the youth 


37 


The Strenuous Career 


who knows not, nor can realize its dangers. He 
is weary of the humdrum existence at home, of 
the never-ending drudgery of the farm, of the 
gray monotony, of the leaden skies of life, and 
so he longs to get away to the din and bustle and 
roar and excitement and myriad allurements of 
the great city where time flies on golden wings 
and men and women, hoys and girls, live and 
eat of the ambrosia of the gods. He contrasts 
the picture his fancy has conjured up of 
the city with that of the reality of the country 
and he shudders at the comparison. The thought 
of the farm becomes a nightmare to him, and 
manual work so distasteful that he makes up 
his mind to leave all behind, and so it is, that 
the farms are becoming deserted by the youth 
of the country, that there is no longer brawn 
and muscle to cultivate them, not to speak of 
brains, and that they are being allowed to run 
to weeds and fallowness, hence the prices of all 
farm products are so dear, that living in the city 
becomes in reality a bitter struggle for exist¬ 
ence with the poor. 

Shakespeare said, “better to endure the ills 
we have than to fly to those we know not of. ’’ 
The fire is a poor exchange for the frying-pan. 
A mountain is grand and impressive when ob¬ 
served from the perspective of distance, its 


38 


Country Boy vs. City Bred Man 


lofty peaks cut tlie clouds and its sides appear 
clothed with a beautiful arborage and foliage, 
but as we approach it, the aspect changes and 
when we come close upon it we find that it is a 
forbidding, bare and bleak succession of rocks, 
whose grim and frowning heights terrify us by* 
their looks, and it is thus with the city. No one 
can realize the magnificent misery of the city 
until he has had experience of it; nor the gilded 
poverty that is enclosed by its walls. The strain 
of city life is one never-ending grind, wearing 
out body and nerves, never giving a surcease 
from the daily, hourly toil and care and worry 
which stifle and smother the finer sentiments of 
the soul. The wheels of the city juggernaut 
never stop, they are constantly revolving, and 
ever crushing out the lives of human beings be¬ 
neath their relentless progress, yet people of 
their own free will lie down and invite their 
own destruction. Unthinkingly they rush to 
their doom. The city is a Scylla that swallows 
into its insatiable depths many a bright ambi¬ 
tion, many a fondly-nurtured hope, many a long- 
cherished scheme, and gives them an eternal 
grave beneath its waters of oblivion. The city 
has torn promise from the hands of youth, and 
stripped the crown from the brow of age. No 
age, no class, no rank is immune from its conta- 


39 


The Strenuous Career • 


gion, which is often more virulent than the 
‘ ‘ black death.’ ’ Once the victim becomes inocu¬ 
lated with its virus of pleasures and follies and 
sins, there is very little hope of recovery be¬ 
cause the bacilli become so deeply imbedded in 
the system, that remedies are of little avail to 
dislodge them, so that they spread until the 
whole body becomes a seething mass of corrup¬ 
tion. 

The city is germ-laden—the country is pure. 
The microbe which ruins soul as well as body, 
seldom if ever visits the country, for the sur¬ 
roundings are unhealthful to its development, 
—the city is the only place in which it can 
thrive. 

The country reflects the smile of its Creator; 
the city, too often the baseness and turpitude 
of man. In the country man can live free and 
independent, fulfilling the Divine injunction to 
earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, but in 
the city he is very often a slave, earning his 
bread by the begrudged privilege of his task¬ 
masters, and not alone by the sweat of his 
brow, but at the expense of blood and bone as 
well. The cities are overcrowded, consequently 
the competition is so keen that living becomes 
next to impossible except for those who have by 
long service gained for themselves permanent 


40 


Country Boy vs. City Bred Man 

places in the life of the community. There is no 
room for strangers at the top, but there are so 
many of the natives pushing and crushing 
around the bottom of the ladder to get a place, 
that there is little chance for the outsider to get 
his foot even on the first rung. 

Could the young man in the country but real¬ 
ize for a moment the condition of affairs in the 
city, he would never wish to exchange his place. 
Surely you would call the person foolish who 
would exchange dross for gold; is he not more 
foolish who barters health for disease, virtue 
for vice and life for death? And this is just 
what the inexperienced youth does who comes 
to the great cities without having friends or in¬ 
fluence to prepare the way for him and clear 
it of the pitfalls and snares with which it is 
lined. But even if it is cleared, he may not be 
able to walk upon it without stumbling, and 
may never reach by it the house of success, 
whereas did he keep on the country road, he 
has as good a chance, in fact a better one, of 
reaching that desirable haven. 

Never did farming pay better than today, or 
never have agricultural pursuits held out such 
alluring inducements; the best of men are turn¬ 
ing their attention in this direction, and these 
know well that brain as well as brawn is very 


41 


The Strenuous Career 


necessary to success. Perhaps to most of us 
in our inexperience, the farmer is identified 
with ignorance, for have we not been convulsed 
with laughter at the outre conceptions of the 
“ Jays” and the ‘ 4 Rubes ’ 9 as caricatured by the 
comic artists, but the farmer has really the 
laugh on us, and can well afford to overlook our 
ignorance. The farmer is the key-stone of the 
social arch, and he knows it; his is the greatest 
of all professions, for all professions have to 
depend upon him. The farmer is a scientist 
and an artist combined, his theodolite the 
plough, his canvas the soil. He may not be 
learned after the fashion of the book-men, but 
it is incumbent on him to be a graduate of the 
university of Nature. He must know the soils, 
their textures and qualities and productive 
properties as a skilled anatomist knows the 
muscles and nerves, he must study the various 
crops as an ethnologist studies the different 
families of mankind, and find out what season 
and what food are adapted to their wants, in a 
word he must be an all-round naturalist. Ignor¬ 
ance in farming will never pay; for a time it 
may succeed in any other profession, but in 
farming it is a dead failure from the beginning, 
therefore it would be well for the young man 
who thinks the avocation of a farmer below his 


42 


Country Boy vs. City Bred Man 


dignity and unworthy his talents, to consider 
that the farmer in the first place represents the 
most honorable of all professions, and second, 
that his is one which calls for the greatest skill 
and experience. Of course from a financial stand¬ 
point the farmer may fall below the others, but 
let it be realized that he is mostly always sure 
of his dividends as his investment has a solid 
foundation, and that there is very little risk of 
his going to bed with a fortune and rising in the 
morning a pauper. Besides let it be remem¬ 
bered that the country boy is nearly always 
sure of having a pretty good account at the 
bank of health; he has pure air and wholesome 
food and these in themselves are good equiva¬ 
lents for gold any day. He does not go to 
bed in a stuffy room, vitiated with miasma and 
lie awake all night listening to the infernal 
noises of a great city, nor does he rack his 
brains as to what is best for him to do on the 
morrow. Shakespeare says, “Uneasy lies the 
head that wears a crown,’’ and the head that is 
filled with money-making schemes that may 
never be realized, lies just as uneasy. Sleep 
loves a good conscience, and one of its favorite 
resting-places is on the pillow of the farmer, 
for though it may only be straw, it is preferred 


43 


The Strenuous Career 


to the swan’s down and costly hangings of the 
millionaire. 

The white-winged dove of peace ever broods 
over the homestead of the farmer, the raven of 
unrest is generally at the door of city-dweller. 
For a time the pleasures and excitement and 
wondrous sights of a great city may give satis¬ 
faction and afford amusement, but they soon 
begin to cloy, and in a little space turn to dead- 
sea fruit; the apples that once looked so luscious 
and inviting will become ashes in the mouth. 
As long as money lasts the city is heaven in 
miniature, as soon as the money is gone, it be¬ 
comes more horrible than the Ninth Circle of 
Dante’s “Inferno.” If you have no money, 
keep away from the city, avoid it as you would 
a lazar-house. The poor man, and especially 
the poor man with a family does not live there, 
though he dwells in its midst, he merely ekes out 
a miserable existence, and goes down to the 
grave without having experienced any of the 
joys or comforts of life. 

I would say to the country boy,—Shun the 
city, keep away from it until your character and 
habits have been so fully formed that you will 
be impervious to temptations. Lay the founda¬ 
tions of your manhood strong and solidly in the 
country, so that there will never be any danger 


44 


Country Boy vs. City Bred Man 


of their being uprooted, graduate in the coun¬ 
try, so that when you enter the university of 
life in the city, you will be an experienced 
scholar, more than able to hold your own. Most 
of the distinguished men who have built the 
ramparts of greatness and success around this 
mighty nation were country-bred boys, but they 
had so firmly established the underlying princi¬ 
ples of character before taking up their places 
in the crowded hives of men that nothing could 
bend them, nothing turn them away from the 
high purposes they had in view; the virus of con¬ 
tamination could not touch them. Of the twenty- 
six Presidents of the United States seventeen 
have come from the country, from the small 
farms around the small townships in remote 
districts ; Roosevelt may be said to be the only 
city-bred man that has occupied the White 
House, but he at an early age severed himself 
from city surroundings and got close to the 
heart of nature and in close communion with the 
country-life. Fully 90 per cent of all the fa¬ 
mous New Yorkers have been country-bred 
and all of them acknowledge their fame and 
success due to the foundations they laid as boys 
on the old farmstead. In fact there are one 
hundred country youths who succeed and make 
their mark in the world to one city-born and 


45 


The Strenuous Career 


city-bred. For every country boy who fails in 
the race of life more than a thousand failures 
can be laid to the city. 

And every day conditions are becoming 
worse in the city, for as the population becomes 
larger, competition becomes keener and the 
field more limited. The city is circumscribed as 
a centre for talent and already it is glutted with 
that commodity. ’Tis mainly the country at 
present that holds out any inducement for 
youthful brains to develop, so that they may 
benefit the world at a future day. 


46 


CHAPTER VI. 

MAKING DIFFICULTIES YIELD TO ENTHUSIASM. 

A man without enthusiasm is an engine with¬ 
out steam. Your brain will not move unless the 
water is boiling. Better boil over than not boil 
at all. Don’t hank the fires in your furnace. 
To a man sneering at excitement, a Western 
editor pithily replied: ‘ ‘ There is only one thing 
done in this world without excitement and that 
is to rot.” 

Enthusiasm generates the impulse that drives 
manhood on to noble achievements. It arouses 
a supernatural heroism in one’s own forces. It 
is the driving force of character; it makes 
strong men; it arouses unsuspected sources of 
ability. The man without enthusiasm in his 
work has lost the race of life before starting. 
Emerson truly remarks that “ every great and 
commanding movement in the annals of the 
world is the triumph of enthusiasm.” Men fail 
because they flinch, fly the track, and yield be¬ 
fore the obstacles that beset their path. 

For a long time Edison’s phonograph re¬ 
fused to say “specia,” it dropped the “s” and 


47 


The Strenuous Career 


said “pecia.” To produce that single sound 
he needed something delicate enough to receive 
impressions not more than a millionth part of 
an inch in depth, and yet rigid enough to carry 
the needle up and down, exactly reproducing 
the vibrations which had made the impressions. 
The scientists told him there was no such sub¬ 
stance in existence. “Then we must produce 
it,” insisted Edison. They declared that it 
could not be done, because the qualities which 
he demanded were inconsistent and exclusive 
of each other. He declared it could be done, 
because it must be done and he did it—but Edi¬ 
son worked eighteen hours a day for seven 
months to secure that single sound. That is the 
story of success since the world began—difficul¬ 
ties yield to enthusiasm. 

Dickens illustrated his saying, “there is no 
substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent and sin¬ 
cere earnestness,’’ by his living day and night 
with the characters of his creation. Correggio, 
when young, saw a painting by Raphael. His 
soul drank in its beauty as flowers do the mois¬ 
ture from the mist. Awakened to the conscious¬ 
ness of artistic power and burning with the 
enthusiasm of enkindled genius, the blood rush¬ 
ing to his brow and the fire flashing from his 
eye, he cried out, “I also am a painter!” That 


48 


Making Difficulties Yield to Enthusiasm 

conviction carried him through his studies, 
blended the colors on his palette, guided his 
pencil and shone on his canvas, until the glori¬ 
ous Titian, on witnessing his productions ex¬ 
claimed, “Were I not Titian, I would wish to 
be Correggio!” Michel Angelo was so filled 
with enthusiasm for his art and so afraid that 
money might taint his brush, that he refused to 
accept any pay whatever for his masterpieces 
in the Vatican and St. Peter’s. 

Joan of Arc honestly believed herself in¬ 
spired by Heaven; her enthusiasm infused into 
others that belief, filled a dispirited soldiery 
and a despairing people with enthusiasm. The 
secret of her success was the boldness of her at¬ 
tacks. When her line of battle advanced with 
enthusiastic shouts the enemies trembled be¬ 
fore the blow was struck and the charge was 
doubly terrific. Under the outburst of her en¬ 
thusiasm she revealed her masterful power. 

Napoleon’s enthusiasm banished the word 
“impossible” from his dictionary. Other 
things being equal the degree of enthusiasm in 
any man is the exact measure of his conquering 
power. It was Bobert Fulton’s enthusiasm 
which pushed the Clermont up the Hudson. It 
was Edison’s enthusiasm which chained electri¬ 
city to the uses of man. Buxton, one of the 


49 


The Strenuous Career 


leaders in the cause of slavery throughout the 
British dominions, who took the position form¬ 
erly occupied by Wilberforce, was no genius, no 
great intellectual leader, mainly an earnest, 
straightforward, resolute, self-willed man and 
his whole character is most forcibly expressed 
in his own words, which every young man might 
well stamp upon his soul, ‘ * The longer I live the 
more I am certain that the great difference be¬ 
tween men, between the feeble and the powerful, 
the great and the insignificant, is energy, invin¬ 
cible determination, a purpose once fixed, then 
death or victory. That quality will do anything 
that can be done in the world; and no talent 
and no circumstances, no opportunities, will 
make a two-legged creature a man without it. ’’ 
Of course there are limitations which no amount 
of enthusiasm, will-power or industry can over¬ 
come—no amount of sun-staring can ever make 
an eagle out of a crow. 

Emerson said: “Nobody can cheat you out 
of ultimate success but yourself.’’ Balzac’s 
father tried to discourage his son from the pur¬ 
suit of literature. “Do you know,” he said, 
“that in literature a man must be either a 
king or a beggar ? ” “Very well, ’ ’ said the boy, 
“I will be a king.” His parents left him to his 
fate in a garret. For ten years he fought ter- 


50 


Making Difficulties Yield to Enthusiasm 


rible battles with poverty, but he came out vic¬ 
torious. The world wants men with the inflex¬ 
ible determination of Paul Jones, who, when 
surrender was demanded, audaciously replied, 
“Surrender? I have just begun to fight.’’ 
There was something sublime in the enthus¬ 
iasm of George H. Corliss, who said, at the time 
of the Centennial Exposition: “I not only can, 
but I will build the best machine the world has 
ever seen.” And he built it. The world has 
no use for Micawberish men, who stand around, 
with arms akimbo set, until occasion tells them 
what to do. The world respects strong, stal¬ 
wart, ironsided men. “I can’t,” never did any¬ 
thing, “I’ll try” has accomplished great things, 
“I will,” has wrought miracles. Don’t flinch, 
flounder or fall. Grapple like a man and you 
will be a man. To succeed you must do as a 
woman does in a crowd at a bargain sale—hold 
your ground and push hard. 


51 


CHAPTEK VII. 

POOR BOYS AND GREAT MEN. 

The cottage has contributed more than the 
castle to the making of manhood, the country 
has given birth to more great men than the city, 
and the University of Hard Knocks has grad¬ 
uated the best scholars. 

Poverty, instead of pinching, dwarfing and 
shutting up a man, rather enlarges and en¬ 
nobles him and sets him free. 

The best dowry for a boy is a childhood spent 
out-doors. Eighty per cent of the college stu¬ 
dents come from the farm. The country and 
the common people have always given to the 
world its seers and sages. Call the roll of the 
great and glorious in life and death—they were 
born in mangers of poverty and cradled in ob¬ 
scurity. Fully eighty-five per cent of the pos¬ 
sessors of palaces in America were born in 
poverty and brought up in the country. Genius 
has rocked her biggest children in the cradle of 
hardship. One of the winning forces in life 
consists in being handicapped. Columbus, dis¬ 
coverer of peerless, unrivalled, unapproached 


52 


Poor Boys and Great Men 

and unapproachable America, was the son of a 
weaver and a weaver himself; Homer was the 
son of a small farmer, and 

tl Seven cities claim him,—dead— 

Thro* which the living Homer begged his bread .” 

Mohammed, founder of a new religion and 
who changed the face of empires, was an orphan 
at eight and afterwards a camel-driver; Coper¬ 
nicus, who introduced the modern system of as¬ 
tronomy was a baker’s son; Stephenson, inven¬ 
tor of the locomotive and Watt, perfector of the 
steam-engine, were both of poor and humble 
origin; Shakespeare, to whose far-reaching, all- 
embracing genius all the world does honor, was 
the son of a wool-carder; Robert Bums, who has 
taken his place in the galaxy of British poets as 
an immortal, a star of the first magnitude, whose 
light glows brighter in the night of time, was a 
ploughman; Daniel Webster, the most versatile 
statesman America has produced, worked on a 
farm as a boy, and when a student at Dart¬ 
mouth, a friend sent him a recipe to grease his 
boots, he sent back word: “But my boots need 
other doctoring, they admit water and even 
gravel-stones;” Henry Clay, whose passionate 
appeals and fervid periods placed him first 
among American orators, was “the mill-boy of 


53 


The Strenuous Career 


the slashes/’ his widowed mother being so poor 
that she could not send him to school, but con¬ 
scious of his oratorical abilities he began to 
speak in a barn with only a horse and a cow for 
an audience; Stephen Girard, the second rich¬ 
est man in his day, came to America as a cabin- 
boy on a vessel and commenced life in the New 
World with a six-pence, but be made the world 
his best school and industry his best capital; 
Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the foundation of his 
great fortune with $50 his mother gave him of 
her savings to buy a small sailboat with which 
he transported market gardening from Staten 
Island to New York City; when the wind was 
unfavorable he pushed the boat along by poles 
and got his freight to market in season; after 
a while he began to run and build steamboats, 
putting his savings into railroads which were 
then being rapidly constructed; John Jacob As- 
tor beat furs for Hayman Levy at a dollar a 
day; Nicholas Low, ancestor of Seth Low, laid 
the foundation of his fortune in a hogshead of 
rum purchased from the same employer. 

Young man! don’t say that you can do noth¬ 
ing, because you are poor, or because you can 
have no one to help you. Take down any ency¬ 
clopedia or biography, or better still, look 
around your city or town and you will see that 

64 


Poor Boys and Great Men 

your distinguished men were rocked in the 
cradles of lowly cottages and buffeted the bil¬ 
lows of fate, depending on their own energy. 

You have no right to be discouraged on ac¬ 
count of adverse circumstances or even feeble 
abilities, for every giant oak in the forest was 
once an acorn, kicked about by the feet of pass¬ 
ing swine. Look about you for proof of what 
I say and you can easily corroborate my state¬ 
ments. The most successful men in business 
and professional life began in their shirt¬ 
sleeves. It seems that, an essential condition of 
success is the necessity of working hard and 
faring meanly. Those who begin with fortunes 
generally lose them; those who begin life on 
crutches will always limp. Necessity is the 
stimulus to industry, hence the blessing of 
labor, which is the very root of all progress in 
the individual as well as in civilization and in 
nations. 

Don’t dream of some Hercules coming to give 
you a lift. All rich men’s sons are not fools, 
any more than poor children are all wise, but the 
heaviest curse on a child, as a rule, is inherited 
wealth. Many a father is his children’s worst 
enemy when he accumulates riches for them to 
squander. Beethoven said of Rossini, that he 
had the stuff in him to make a good musician, 


55 


The Strenuous Career 


if lie had only been well flogged when a hoy; 
he was spoiled by the ease with which he com¬ 
posed. Many a man has been spoiled by the 
ease with which he began life. Success is chiefly 
due to one’s own ability, determination, cour¬ 
age and will. 

At the outset of your career form the solemn 
purpose to make the most of your powers and 
to turn to the very best possible account every 
outward advantage within your reach. Let no 
vision haunt you of some old uncle or aunt or 
some unheard-of relative conveniently dying 
and leaving you a trifle of $20,000, with which 
you may earn $100,000. Grapple like a man 
and you will be a man. Swim off and don’t wait 
for anybody to put a cork under yon! 


56 


CHAPTER VIII. 

LITTLE THINGS AND SUCCESS. 

Most of the great discoveries of the world 
have resulted from the attentive observation of 
little things. The art of printing which has de¬ 
veloped the human mind, promoted civilization, 
liberalized men, revolutionized religious be¬ 
liefs and changed the form of governments— 
owes its origin to rude impressions, for the 
amusement of children, from letters carved on 
the bark of a beech tree. A verger in the ca¬ 
thedral at Pisa, after filling with oil a lamp 
which hung from the roof, left it swinging to- 
and-fro; Galileo, then eighteen, noting it atr 
tentively conceived the idea of applying it to the 
measurement of time—after fifty years of hard 
study and labor he completed the invention of 
the pendulum. In like manner, Galileo, having 
heard that the children of a Dutch spectacle 
maker, by placing several pairs of spectacles 
before one another, and looking through them 
saw a distant object, was led to the invention of 
the telescope. 

A sea-weed floating past Columbus’ ships 


57 


The Strenuous Career 


was a little thing, but it enabled Columbus to 
quell the mutiny which had arisen among his 
sailors at not discovering land, and to show 
them that the eagerly-sought-for new world was 
not far off. 

The cackling of a goose is fabled to have 
saved Kome from the Gauls, and flies hastened 
the birth of American Independence. The Con¬ 
tinental Congress had its meeting in a livery 
stable. Its members wore knee breeches and 
silk stockings and with handkerchiefs in hand 
they were diligently employed in lashing the 
flies from their legs. To so great an impatience 
did the flies arouse the sufferers, that it hast¬ 
ened, if it did not aid in inducing them, 
to promptly sign their names to that immortal 
document, the greatest ever penned, which gave 
birth to an empire republic. 

McClellan lacked the dash and energy of 
Grant, but McClellan’s patience for details put 
the Army of the Potomac, which had been 
broken-up and disorganized, in the condition 
which enabled Grant to hurl it with crushing 
force against the enemy. Grant said, 44 I’ll fight 
it out on this line, if it takes all summer,” but 
the lines on which Grant fought it out and won 
out were laid by McClellan who had compacted 
and solidified the separate units of each regi¬ 


es 


Little Things and Success 


ment. He personally arranged the details of 
camp life and superintended every department 
of the unwieldy body of raw recruits. His 
scientific skill in looking after details and his 
genius for small things built the bridge over 
which Grant marched to victory. 

Napoleon combined the qualities of McClellan 
and Grant—he had first-class organizing ability 
and the power to execute his plans. We find the 
hero of Austerlitz directing the purchase of 
horses, arranging for an advance supply of sad¬ 
dles and giving directions about shirts for the 
troops. His familiar knowledge of details, pre¬ 
meditated and carried out to the letter, resulted 
in his colossal triumph. 

The battle of Dunbar was decided against 
the Scotch, because their matches had given out. 
A bridge at Angiers, France, went down be¬ 
cause the regiments kept step while crossing— 
the aggregation of similar treads became an 
irresistible power of destruction—aggregations 
of little either make or break. 

Washington, even while President, was so at¬ 
tentive to little things that it is said he scru¬ 
tinized the smallest of his household expenses. 
Benjamin Franklin impresses the value of small 
things in his illustration of the horse-shoe nail 
—for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for 


59 


The Strenuous Career 


want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of 
a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and 
slain by the enemy. 

Have a hobby for yonr spare moments. Ba¬ 
con’s fame is mainly due to books written in his 
spare honrs while he was England’s chancellor. 
Humboldt’s days were so occupied with his 
business that he had to pursue his scientific 
labors in the night or early morning. Burns 
wrote his most beautiful poems in his spare 
moments while working on a farm. Grote wrote 
his “History of Greece” during the odds and 
ends of time snatched from his duty as a 
banker. “Moments are the golden sands of 
time,” if rightly used. 

As Michel Angelo explained to his vistor what 
he had been doing at a statue since his previous 
visit—trifles make perfection and perfection is 
no trifle. In God’s universe there are no trifles; 
even the dust has its appointed place in the 
economy of nature—it gives to us the blue of 
the skies and of the sea. It is the canvas on 
which the sun paints the gorgeous colors of 
the morning and of the evening. Without dust 
there would be no diffused daylight; we should 
have to choose between the glare of the sun’s 
direct rays and total darkness. To the presence 
of the dust we owe the formation of mists, 


60 


Little Things and Success 

clouds and rains instead of water-spouts and 
destructive torrents. 

A very little thing makes all the difference. 
A touch of the lever and the paddles turn astern. 
Sand makes up the basis on which vessels are 
wrecked. Little things accumulate into charac¬ 
ter and determine destiny. 

The foundations of the sky-scraping build¬ 
ings are made of bits of cement, fine as dust, 
mixed with countless drops of water. So with 
our lives. The countless particles of the cement 
of little things must underlie all big things. 
Macaulay said—“You must dig deep, if you 
would build high. ,, He might have added: 
“You must live in littleness, if you would rise 
to greatness/’ Wordsworth characterizes the 
“little nameless, unremembered acts of kind¬ 
ness and of love” as the “best portion of a good 
man’s life.” The real heroism of life is to do 
its little duties promptly and faithfully. 


61 


CHAPTER IX. 

DOES A COLLEGE EDUCATION PAy£ 

The monetary question—will a college educa¬ 
tion pay?—is one which should not influence a 
young man’s decision as to whether he should 
go to college or not. Education can never be 
discounted in any form, and the higher it is, the 
more it brings out a man’s faculties and de¬ 
velops all that is in him, hut sometimes it is bet¬ 
ter not to bring out all and let some of the facul¬ 
ties lie dormant. There is such a thing as being 
too smart, and similarly a man can be too 
learned, both for his own advantage and the 
good of the community. A learned criminal is 
more dangerous than an ignorant one. But 
apart from the ethical aspect of the question, 
the economic can be answered both ways. 
Higher education is the greatest advantage to 
some, to others it is a drawback. Very often 
on account of greed, sometimes owing to neces¬ 
sity, bright boys are taken out of school and 
sent to the work-shop, who, were they allowed 
to pursue their studies in the advanced fields 
of learning, would doubtless enrich the world 


62 


Does a College Education Payf 

■with the product of their brains. Many parents 
pursue “A penny wise and pound foolish pol¬ 
icy 9 9 in regard to their children. They think to 
add to the family hoard a few pennies salary, 
and for the sake of this, they dwarf the minds 
of their boys by taking them from school, stunt 
their undeveloped bodies by putting them too 
early to work, and thus cloud and blast all their 
future. ’Tis true that not all the hoys put to 
work could reach the plane of a higher educa¬ 
tion, but they could obtain sufficient whereon to 
base a solid career. 

What would not many of our rich men give 
for an education! Without it they only live 
half a life and they fully realize the defect. 
They are like nuts without the kernel, fair on 
the outside, hollow within. 

Ignorance has ever been a misfortune; not 
alone has it kept millions in poverty, but it has 
retarded the progress of the world. The great 
problem of existence is not, how to make a liv¬ 
ing, but how to make a life—a life beautiful and 
bright and hopeful, looking ahead to a happy 
consummation, not a life of toil and drudgery 
and despair, with no ray of light to pierce the 
darkness of the future, but a life that shall be a 
glory and not a grind. 

Money is not the criterion of success, nor the 


63 


The Strenuous Career 


be-all and the end-all of life. A man should be 
ashamed to think that he has nothing better to 
leave to his children than money—such a man 
should be afraid to die. The lowest estimate 
of life is that which views it merely in the light 
of an opportunity to make money and with no 
thought whatever to those attributes of charac¬ 
ter which constitute true manhood and elevate 
it to a level with the divine. If money were Its 
goal, life would not be worth living. Eich men 
have not enriched the world, rather have they 
retarded and impoverished it, but the poor men, 
—the philosophers, scholars, thinkers, toilers, 
the men who have despised the dross of gold for 
gold in itself, are the ones who have twined the 
laurels of victory around the brow of mankind 
and made the race rule from the throne of in¬ 
tellect. 

The man who regards a college training 
mainly from the stand-point of its commercial 
value has an unworthy idea and himself is un¬ 
worthy of such a training. Charles Dudley 
Warner says—“A man who has made the most 
of his opportunities, and who, in addition, has 
cultivated every faculty with which he is en¬ 
dowed, has won success.” To make the great¬ 
est possible progress, to become as perfectly de¬ 
veloped as ability permits, means real success. 


64 


Does a College Education Pay ? 

A college training, or its equivalent self-cul¬ 
ture, helps one to make the most of his talents. 
Such an education stands for an investment of 
power—it not only creates power, but increases 
it and promotes the demands of modern life— 
the power to think and the power to will. 

The men of great enterprises are eagerly 
seeking those who are able to think clearly and 
those who are able to will promptly, or in other 
words, those whose assets consist in a thorough 
education. 

All other things being equal, a college edu¬ 
cation prepares a man for big things in life—it 
strengthens the mind, brings the will under 
control, disciplines the faculties, gives a larger, 
clearer vision and a stronger confidence in one’s 
self, and apart from the broadening and devel¬ 
oping of character and the expansion of the 
mental endowments, there is the pleasure and 
the happiness it brings into one’s life, the de¬ 
lightful associations, the satisfaction which 
comes from the feeling of the power to reach 
out and know that we can assist and be of help 
to others. 

College friendships alone would compensate 
for the time and cost expended in obtaining a 
college education. Nothing else can take the 
place of such an education. True, a man may 


65 


The Strenuous Career 


be learned, polished, refined, yet without the 
college training he lacks the discipline and that 
spirit of comradeship which characterize the 
fraternity. Nothing else so enriches life, broad¬ 
ens the views, ennobles the aims, strengthens 
the choice of right, clarifies the vision and gives 
such an exalted love for the beautiful. 

Even from a business point of view, it pays. 
With an education you can make money, but 
with money you cannot buy an education. Of 
course many of our greatest men were born in 
the backwoods and what education they had was 
self-obtained, and it may be that had they been 
sent to college, they would not have become 
so famous as they did. But competition is much 
keener in our day than in theirs, so it behooves 
the man who would come to the front at the 
present time to be well equipped for the race. 
Still there are men of very mediocre education 
on the highest rung of the ladder of success, 
men to whom, in all probability, the higher edu¬ 
cation would have been a detriment. 

Some years ago a young Westerner entered a 
leading college, but he got so tired of the curri¬ 
culum that he remained only two weeks when 
he went back to the farm. He became very suc¬ 
cessful as a farmer, advancing until he owned 
10,000 acres and was very wealthy. He got an 


66 


Does a College Education Payf 

invitation from the President of the college 
which he had attended for the two weeks, to be 
present at a Commencement exercise. 

The President introduced him to the students: 
“This is Mr. M—,” said he, “who attended 
our college for two weeks, and now owns ten 
thousand acres of farm land; I wonder how 
many acres he would have owned had he fin¬ 
ished the college course!” “Not an acre,” 
shouted Mr. M—, to the amusement of the stu¬ 
dents. 

A nation’s greatness depends upon the edu¬ 
cation of its people. The most educated nation 
in the world to-day is Germany, only 1 per cent 
of the population being illiterate; Germany be¬ 
lieved in education, and she so influenced the 
popular mind as to be successful in drawing 
others to acknowledge her supremacy. The ef¬ 
fect of education is seen on all her products; 
her goods are unrivalled in the world’s mar¬ 
kets. 

What is true of nations is true of individuals. 
Educated men, as a rule, are at the front. 
Everywhere to-day they are taking the largest 
share of the prizes. The trend of the times has 
materially changed within a few years. Twen¬ 
ty-five years ago many of the college men went 
into the ministry, while many also took up medi- 


67 


The Strenuous Career 


cine and law. Now but few gravitate towards 
the church and great numbers are going into 
commercial walks of life, into the great bank¬ 
ing houses, insurance companies and manufac¬ 
turing establishments. The trained mind as 
well as the skilful hand is now in universal de¬ 
mand and can command the highest salary. 

There is no calling to-day in which the earn¬ 
ing power of the industrious is not increased by 
education—knowledge without practical ability 
is useless, both must be combined to command 
attention. The comprehensive control of abil¬ 
ity and the full development of the innate qual¬ 
ities constitute a true education. 

The question is—what can you do? It is not 
where you were educated or what degree you 
hold, but what practical ability can you display? 

Ninety-two per cent of our population earn 
a livelihood by manual labor, the remaining 
eight per cent enter into business or profes¬ 
sional life. If your ambition is to be numbered 
among the minority, it will pay you to go to col¬ 
lege. Of course, mere money makers can suc¬ 
ceed without an education, but money-making 
is not the highest kind of success. The chance 
of a properly educated man in holding a posi¬ 
tion as against an uneducated one is as 250 to 1 
according to United States Commissioner of 
Education, Harris. 

G8 


Does a College Education Payf 


A college education has its defects and dis¬ 
advantages. It is possible to over-develop the 
theoretical faculties, and this causes a weaken¬ 
ing of the practical and executive ability which 
enables one to act promptly, vigorously and 
with precision, and moreover, a man is given 
so much tine in college for the niceties and 
amenities of life, and is so accustomed to weigh 
and balance, that the rough world will lose pa¬ 
tience with him and not take time to let him ex¬ 
plain himself. For this very reason our best 
colleges are modifying their courses of study 
and introducing a practical utilitarian spirit 
into their classes in order to meet the demands 
of the times. College men have in the past, in 
a good many cases, been looked upon as imprac¬ 
tical-theorists, dreamers, and because of this 
idea they were debarred from commercial life 
and relegated to some of the so-called learned 
professions, but this idea the public had of the 
college man is fast disappearing and hefis com¬ 
ing to be recognized as an important factor in 
the business life of the nation. Formerly col¬ 
lege training consisted mainly in Greek, Latin 
and mathematics. Today it is everything that 
touches life. 

Great corporations are employing college 
men to the exclusion of others, for they find that 


69 


The Strenuous Career 


the former can master details much quicker 
owing to the mental training they have re¬ 
ceived. On the whole the demand for thor¬ 
oughly trained men is greater than the supply; 
$10,000 to $25,000 jobs go begging for the right 
men to fill them. 

A college education is an investment of from 
$1,000 to $10,000 and the only men who cannot 
make interest on the investment are those who 
have no special qualifications as men. 


70 


CHAPTER X. 

SELF-SUPPORTING AT COLLEGE. 

Time was, when to work one’s way through 
an American college was a matter of but little 
difficulty, only necessitating a fair amount of 
application, backed by the grit indispensible to 
success, even under the fairest circumstances, 
but of recent years a big change has taken place, 
and the student who would succeed now-a-days 
must needs be a “hustler,” must have invin¬ 
cible courage and unflagging determination to 
reach the goal of his ambitions. The expendi¬ 
tures have mightily increased with the pros¬ 
perity of the times. There is scarcely any com¬ 
parison between the college cuisine and general 
living of to-day and that of thirty years ago. 
Then the fare was meagre and of but poor qual¬ 
ity and other accommodations correspondingly 
inferior, so that students were more or less like 
anchorites in their cells, except that they were 
inflicting their bodies, not for the good of their 
souls, but for the good of their minds, but to¬ 
day, many young men at college live in sybaritic 
splendor, indulging every fastidious desire and 


71 


The Strenuous Career 


whim of the passing hour. Yet it is possible 
still for the poor youth, amid the magnificent 
surroundings and luxuries which wealth creates, 
to carve his way to the front without doing so 
at the expense of his manhood or self-respect. 

Money too often proves the undoing of the 
student, while the lack of it is the greatest in¬ 
centive to spur him to endeavor and enable him 
to reach success. The college curriculum never 
calls for Bacchanalian revels, carousings and 
feastings, but it does call for hard, honest study 
which merits reward. The millionaire college 
man is handicapped by his gold, while the other 
fellow without such a burden is so much lighter 
that he easily out-distances the former in the 
race for honors. In the graduating classes of 
our leading colleges and universities the poor 
students are coming off the victors, gathering 
the laurels and bearing away the coveted prizes 
of learning. If the poor boy is a hustler, if he 
sets his shoulder to the wheel with grim deter¬ 
mination to make it revolve, he cannot fail to 
accomplish his purpose. 

Though the living expenses of college life are 
vastly increased, there is a corresponding in¬ 
crease in the methods of self-support. A hun¬ 
dred doors are open through which any young 
man of brains and perseverance and the neces- 


72 


Self-Supporting at College 

sary grit can pass to a college education, but 
some there are who keep their eyes shut and 
do not see the open doors, hut to those who do 
and who possess the requisite qualities, there 
is every incentive to push ahead. 

Penniless Italian boys have become wealthy 
real-estate holders by blacking shoes; some of 
our millionaires laid the nucleus of their for¬ 
tunes by selling shoe-strings, others by peddling 
with packs and pushcarts and in a thousand 
other humble ways. Why then can not the am¬ 
bitious boy with a goal in view make enough to 
enable him to attain that goal? There is noth¬ 
ing to prevent him, if he has tact and persever¬ 
ance and wisely makes use of his earnings. At 
most of our colleges, including some of the best 
such as Brown and even Harvard, students can 
get board for $2.50 or $3.00 a week, by join¬ 
ing a co-operative society, and in Western col¬ 
leges the scale is still lower. Tuition is cheap— 
$50.00 per annum upwards. He must indeed 
be a poor hustler who cannot amass this sum 
at some legitimate business in his off hours. If 
he cannot do so he has no need of a college edu¬ 
cation, he is better without one. Such a small 
sum could be easily earned by selling news¬ 
papers, as many a boy has done, but this neces¬ 
sitates early rising and the boy who would 


73 


The Strenuous Career 


choose this line must not be a sluggard. How¬ 
ever, if the would-be student is gifted with tal¬ 
ent, mental or mechanical, there are many di¬ 
rections in which he can put it to account, and 
though he will still have to hustle, much of toil 
and drudgery can be eliminated. For instance 
if he is a musician—the master of some instru¬ 
ment, such as the violin or guitar—he can find 
many engagements to net a little money—play¬ 
ing at concerts, musicals, “at homes/* wed¬ 
dings and social gatherings, etc.; if an elocu¬ 
tionist, a similar way lies before him of convert¬ 
ing his talent into cash. But if the hoy has a 
trade at his finger ends before entering college, 
he has an inexhaustible capital in himself and 
one which will stand him in good stead at every 
turn-round. For example, the young man who 
starts off to college with a good knowledge of 
stenography and typewriting has a small for¬ 
tune at command. Work awaits him at every 
corner ; the college has work for him, the mer¬ 
chant has work for him, the professional man 
has work for him, and from all he can reap a 
harvest to store away mental grain in the gran¬ 
aries of knowledge. 

Newspaper reporting, especially reporting 
the different college games and other athletic 
news can he made a good source of income. Of- 


74 


Self-Supporting at College 

ten local papers have an opportunity at “rush” 
times for ambitious hoys who watch their 
chances and are keen to seize opportunities as 
they arise. 

In large cities, teaching in the evenings opens 
up a wide field for the youth who is desirous of 
getting along in the world. Thousands of stu¬ 
dents have used the teacher’s desk as the first 
and best stepping-stone to fame and fortune. 
Many of the greatest men America has pro¬ 
duced, men who have left their footprints deep 
in the world’s history, began as teachers and 
with the money thus earned entered the col¬ 
leges and universities to continue their studies 
and fit themselves for their real life work. 

A boy with a business head will get along at 
college as well as outside of it. At Princeton 
and some other institutions, young men with 
executive ability run eating clubs whereby they 
get their own board free; some have little sta¬ 
tionery stands in their own rooms where they 
do a thriving business, while not a few open 
boot-black parlors and cater to the wants of the 
fraternity in this direction. Every college has 
its agencies for laundries, athletic goods, etc., 
and these pay well for the trouble entailed in 
canvassing the students. Other kinds of can¬ 
vassing yield a good emolument. 


75 


The Strenuous Career 


If an ambitious young barber should happen 
to read this and make up bis mind to seek a col¬ 
lege education, let him go ahead, take his chair, 
his razors and scissors, his soaps and brushes 
along with him, set up the paraphernalia in his 
room and success is bound to come, if he has 
pluck and behaves himself. 

If you are a tailor and sigh for new worlds 
to conquer, get a move on, make for the college 
you think best suited for your capacity, and 
start right in to keep your fellow students’ 
clothes in repair and soon you will have more 
than you can do, you will have to call in assis¬ 
tants, and you will be, not alone making your 
way through college, but making money as well. 
One Princeton undergraduate pays his way and 
all incidentals by delivering the morning pa¬ 
pers, several others by waiting at table. 

During the vacation the ambitious boy has 
many opportunities. The sea-side resorts and 
the mountains clamor for help. Hotels, cafes, 
restaurants, clubs, swimming pavilions, etc., 
give employment to thousands and as a general 
rule, the college student gets first chance, for 
the manager is inclined to rely on his honesty 
and ability and besides likes to help ambition 
along, therefore, in nearly every case, he gives 
the college man the preference before all others. 


76 


Self-Supporting at College 

Sometimes it happens that the extra labor in¬ 
volved, the worry and anxiety to get on and suc¬ 
ceed, undermines health and the whole beauti¬ 
ful vision of the future crowned with the glit¬ 
tering stars of success, passes away never to 
return, leaving the blackness of disappointment 
behind. Therefore, remember boys! that a col¬ 
lege education can be purchased too dear—it is 
too dear when bought with the sacrifice of 
health. Health is the most priceless commodity 
in the world; when it is gone, all your capital is 
gone and you have nothing to return dividends 
for your support. Put health first, college after. 
Health and a college education always make a 
good working team, they hitch well together 
and can accomplish much. 

Don’t he ashamed young man to work your 
way through college, others have done it before 
you and came out on the top and were admired 
and respected for their grit and perseverance. 
The world wants such men, not the dawdlers and 
idlers who depend, not alone on their fathers’ 
money, but their fathers’ names to push them 
along in the race of life, which to them is no 
race at all. 

* 1 If by your father’s worth, yours you rate, 

Count me those only who were good and great! ’ ’ 


77 


The Strenuous Career 


The world wants you and not your father, it 
is waiting for you to come in as your father 
goes out, and do a man’s part like a man, and 
worthy of a man in the right acceptation of that 
title. 

Usually self-supporting students are the most 
desirable from an ethical view-point; they have 
no money to throw away in idle dissipations; 
they cannot afford to drink or gamble or smoke 
or take part in any of the reckless excesses 
which so often characterize the college life of 
the sons of the rich, therefore, they learn early 
to acquire habits of economy as well as of thrift 
and industry necessary to bring them through, 
and so develop into wise, steady level-headed 
men, the ones on whom the world depends for 
its stability and support. They know what it is 
to surmount difficulites, and as Epictetus says, 
—“Difficulties are things that show what men 
are.” The man who puts himself through col¬ 
lege, clean, healthy, self-reliant, leaving behind 
a record for honesty and honor has proved him¬ 
self, and needs no other credentials when he 
girds his loins to enter the stern battle of life. 


78 


CHAPTER XI 

LUCK AND PLUCK. 

Luck is a Fool, Pluck is a Hero. 

The most fascinating myth in the folk-lore of 
any land, is the leprechaun or fairy shoe maker 
of Irish mythology. This conception of an ever 
fanciful and poetic people, was supposed to 
have the power of conferring on the one who 
captured him untold wealth, but it was extremely 
difficult to catch him napping. About three 
inches in height and gorgeously clothed in green 
breeches and scarlet vest he was supposed to 
be seen in the summer evenings seated on the 
green knolls industriously plying his trade of 
shoe-maker to the fairies, but was always keep¬ 
ing a weather eye open for those in search of 
him. The peasant who caught the little fel¬ 
low was enriched for life. He had only to put 
him in his pocket and keep him there until the 
location of a crock of gold was revealed, in or¬ 
der to obtain his release. Even at this day, in 
the remote districts of Ireland the natives still 
believe in the myth and many of them waste 
their time and neglect their work seeking the 
leprechaun among the green hills. 


79 


The Strenuous Career 


The only leprechaun and the one which is 
common to all lands is opportunity, which is 
only another way of spelling pluck. It has the 
power of enriching you, but like the other one 
it is very elusive; you must pluckily and per¬ 
sistently seek for it and when you find it you 
must immediately seize it and hold on to it with 
grim tenacity until it leads you to the desire 
of your ambitions. 

Don’t crave for good you have never earned; 
don’t pray to luck to give you what does not 
belong to you; don’t fancy that every rich and 
famous man has got his goods by some turn of 
the wheel of fortune. It is this philosophy that 
makes some people feel that the successful have 
no special right to their property or their hon¬ 
ors and so they determine to get either from 
them if they can. These are the men who make 
our gamblers and loafers, of high and low de¬ 
gree ; they may be people who originally meant 
no harm, but they came to believe in luck, and 
instead of looking on this world as a bee-hive 
of industry where men are rewarded, not only 
according to their talents, but according to their 
efforts, they regard it as a grand lottery in 
which shirkers have as fair a show as the work¬ 
ers. 

Why does one man succeed where another 


80 


Luck and Pluck 


fails? One takes opportunity, which has hair 
in front, by the forelock, well-knowing that, 
bald behind, once it turns its back he will never 
get a chance of gripping it again, while the 
other, waiting to hear a foot-fall from luck, lets 
opportunity pass his door, and thus many a 
man fritters away his time and his life. 

The one has the alertness and enterprise to 
embark at the opportune moment and is car¬ 
ried swiftly to success, the other with equal 
facilities for reaching that desired haven, failed 
to embrace the opportunity and with arms 
akimbo set, waiting for occasion to tell him 
what to do, explains his past failures with the 
bogey “if,”—If this or that had not happened 
he would now be rich instead of poor, he would 
now be carried on the crested wave of a popular 
enthusiasm instead of groaning in the dark val¬ 
ley of misfortune. 

Belief in luck retards progress, dulls the in¬ 
tellect, deadens the wits, debases .the body and 
keeps its votaries ever behind in the race of 
life. The man who believes that his luck is 
against him—good luck—has cast over himself 
an insidious spell, and soon he will feel that it 
is useless to knock at the treasure-room of fame 
and fortune, that a deaf ear will be turned to 
him, because he comes to believe that door to be 
open only to its favored children. 


81 


The Strenuous Career 


I know full well that many shrewd men with 
indefatigable industry and closest economy fail, 
while many a man with apparently none of the 
winning forces blunders into profitable specu¬ 
lations and Midas-like turns everything he 
touches to gold; yet I fancy that these same 
men are only apparently lacking the qualities 
that insure success. 

The philosphy of luck is a moral palsy the 
cure of which can be found in pluck. The story 
of successful men shows that they did not find 
the opportunities lying around loose like rocks 
on a roadside. When the path of life is too easy 
to walk it generally happens that there will be 
a great scarcity of materials to make oppor¬ 
tunities, but on the hard road you will find them 
at almost every turn. 

In the Michigan State Penitentiary at Jack- 
son a convict has taken a correspondence course 
in architecture. He had to work only six hours 
a day for the State, the time after that was his 
own and he improved it; now, he is not only 
drawing plans for the prison authorities, but is 
doing work for parties outside. Think of that 
—you, young men who spend your evenings in 
saloons and pool-rooms—free—yet frittering 
away your time and thus wasting your oppor¬ 
tunities. 


82 


Luck and Pluck 


The swinging lamp in the cathedral had been 
seen before by hundreds, but it was left to 
Galileo to seize the opportunity of its signifi¬ 
cance. Thousands of men saw apples falling 
from trees before Newton’s time, but he alone 
had the foresight to grasp this opportunity 
for demonstrating the doctrine of attraction— 
the centre of gravity. 

A man’s opportunity usually has some rela¬ 
tion to his ability, it is an opening for a man of 
his talents or means. It is not his luck, but 
rather his pluck that crowns him with honors. 

Young men are heard complaining that they 
are worthy of higher positions and long for 
better opportunities, they want to succeed, but 
scorn the opportunities successful men improve. 
They want to be given a lift, shot up in an ele¬ 
vator or carried up in an air-ship, so that they 
may avoid the arduous struggles of those who 
have been successful. 

Many a man loses his opportunity by slight¬ 
ing his work. Don’t worry about your salary; 
increase your skill. Strive to earn more than 
you are paid for. 

Never despair! Don’t whimper! Be up and 
doing! and luck, in the right sense of that much 
perverted word, will some day be yours. 

A “happy hit” may sometimes be made by a 


83 


The Strenuous Career 


bold venture, but, in the long run, the safest road 
to travel, is the highway of steady industry. 

Don’t envy your more prosperous neighbor 
and again murmur, “he’s lucky.” Envy is the 
miserable expedient that lazy people resort to, 
to drown the reproaches of conscience. Don’t 
persuade yourself that you have been unfortu¬ 
nate when you have been just foolish. The only 
bad luck is bad pluck, good luck is good pluck; 
no man ever lost his luck until he first lost his 
pluck. 

God gives you enough when He gives you 
opportunity. A wise man will make more op¬ 
portunities than he finds. Great opportunities 
are the wise improvement of small ones. If 
your opportunities are not good enough improve 
them. 

Possess your soul in patience. Your time will 
come if you deserve it. Meanwhile make hay 
while the sun shines. Gather roses while they 
bloom. 


84 


CHAPTER XII. 

HEALTH AND SUCCESS. 

There is a vital connection between capacious 
lungs and a large brain power, the latter de¬ 
pending for its full force on the former. Good 
red blood corpuscles can be found only in a 
healthy body, and a healthy body depends en¬ 
tirely on a right course of living and is indis- 
pensible to success in life, in every calling from 
the humblest to the highest. 

To withstand the severe strain of modern liv¬ 
ing and the keen competition of the present day, 
calls for muscles of steel and nerves of whip¬ 
cord and only those who have the necessary 
stamina and life force can hope to successfully 
wage the combat in the stern battle of life. 
Weaklings go to the wall and are trampled 
down by the vigorous combatants as they im¬ 
petuously rush again and again to the conflict. 

In every path of human endeavor, from the 
laborer, who toils by force of arms and limbs, 
to the mental worker, who depends on brain 
power alone to wage the fight^ a strong body is 
necessary to a realization of life’s purpose. 


S5 


The Strenuous Career 


Success is another name for power, and power 
is simply energy and the physical endurance 
which generates resources. Put one man in an 
arid desert and he will wrest a living from the 
barren soil, put another in a fertile valley and 
he will actually die of starvation, because the 
former exerts the latent power that is in him, 
while the other allows it to lie dormant and will 
not arouse it from its lethargy. Nature is nig¬ 
gardly, she will not give up her treasures until 
they are wrested from her grasp by mighty 
endeavor; she even denies a bare living to those 
who will not work for it, though indirectly she 
has to provide for the human parasites who will 
neither toil nor spin, but she makes up for their 
support by exacting a correspondingly larger 
measure of toil from her other children. 

Many men have been handicapped in life’s 
race by a cruel fate, but they were big enough 
to rise above misfortune and conquer all obsta¬ 
cles. Demosthenes was of puny physique, 
but he triumphed over weakness, made his 
voice heard in the councils of Greece and left 
a name as the world’s greatest orator. Homer 
and Milton were both blind, but by iron deter¬ 
mination they overcame their misfortunes and 
enriched mankind by the genius that was theirs. 
Carlyle suffered all his days from dyspepsia, 


86 


Health and Success 


but this did not keep him from battling bravely 
until he won the ]aurel branch as a master of 
English literature. Ruskin, one of the greatest 
of thinkers and keenest of philosophers, bore 
the martyrdom of ill-health, but never let it im¬ 
pede his great work. Our best historian, Fran¬ 
cis Parkman, throughout life was an invalid, 
yet he will live forever in the invaluable histor¬ 
ies he has written. These are only a few 
grand exceptions that prove the rule, that the 
men of enduring power and elastic nerve do 
most in the world. If these men were so able 
to school thmselves and make their imperious 
powers obey their indomitable wills, under such 
trying difficulties and adverse circumstances, 
what might they not have accomplished had ro¬ 
bust health been theirs, had not physical ills 
been so strong against them? 

The world is yet thrilled by the bravery of 
Leonidas and his gallant band of three hundred 
at Thermopylae and how in that rugged moun¬ 
tain pass they defended the glory of Greece 
and Western civilization against the Persian 
hordes, against the ignorance, fanaticism and 
oppression of the Asiatic barbarians. There 
was only one sick man at Thermopylae and he 
traveled from Alpeni to share the conflict that 
made his name immortal. The Duke of Well- 


87 


The Strenuous Career 


ington stood four-square to every wind that 
blew. Gladstone, Webster and Clay thundered 
their periods with voices that knew not weari- 
ess or fatigue. Grant on Mt. Gregor, even in 
the throes of dissolution, rose like one of the 
wounded gods of Homer, drove death back and 
kept him at bay six months while he finished 
his “Memoirs.” 

Business men who succeed are healthy. A 
vigorous constitution is necessary to the com¬ 
mercial man; the mental strain is severe, to say 
nothing of the physical, and a sound body is re¬ 
quired at every turn to combat both. 

Ignorance of the laws of health and hygiene 
sometimes entail very serious consequences, 
marring the beauty and the usefulness of life. 
Learn above all things how to conserve health, 
as it is the most valuable asset you can possess. 
Carelessness of health is a crime. Breathe 
pure air at all times and never neglect to take 
a sufficient amount of exercise necessary to keep 
the body in good working order. Keep your 
surroundings well ventilated so that the atmos¬ 
phere can never become vitiated. Open the 
windows in the home, the office, the workshop, 
the mill, the schoolroom and the church; never 
sit in a close stuffy chamber or breathe an¬ 
other’s breath, as the oxygen is exhausted and 
what remains is gaseous poison. 


88 


Health and Success 


Lack of sleep and overwork are ruinous to 
the American people and are rapidly under¬ 
mining the health of the nation. Benjamin 
Franklin said,—“Six hours sleep for a man, 
seven for a woman and eight for a fool.” I 
take eight. 

The strenuous life is accountable for many 
of the ills. Men are in such a hurry to catch the 
world by the speed of foot, that they have no 
time to devote to their health. Merchants, pro¬ 
fessional men and all kinds of business men bolt 
their luncheons, while on the wing, so to speak; 
no time is given for process of digestion, and 
thus instead of building up and strengthening 
the system to enable it to withstand labor, it 
simply poisons it and cuts life short. Then, at 
night, these men rush to their homes fagged 
out and they cannot sleep on account of the 
cares of the world pressing heavily on their 
shoulders, and in the morning they arise hag¬ 
gard and unrefreshed to commence the same 
programme over again, and this goes on from 
day to day and year to year with no let up. It 
is not at all strange, then, that American men 
are prematurely old at fifty, just at an age when 
they should really be commencing to live. The 
same is true of American women. So-called so¬ 
cial duties claim their time and the sacrifice of 


89 


The Strenuous Career 


their health, and they, too, are old women be¬ 
fore they reach the meridian of existence. 

When the lust of gold no longer burns in the 
veins, when health is placed before wealth, then 
may we look forward to a nation of strong men 
and women who will conserve the heritage of 
the past and insure the greatness and glory of 
the future. 

One reason why the country boy out-dis¬ 
tances his city brother in life’s race is because 
his body has been better developed in the best 
of all gymnasiums, the farm. Guiding the 
plough gives strength to arm and leg, pitch¬ 
ing hay makes broad shoulders, sawing 
wood toughens the muscles, milking cows devel¬ 
ops grip and every other occupation of the 
farm tends to make strong fibre and healthy 
bodies, whereas the most active outdoor exer¬ 
cise for thousands of hollow-chested youths in 
the city consists in carrying a huge cane. 

Athletics like everything else, have their use 
and abuse. Interest in manly sports, sports 
that will build brawn and brain and not brutal¬ 
ize or degrade, is a healthy sign of the times, 
but American-like we have swung from the one 
extreme of neglecting healthy exercise to the 
other of devoting too much time and attention 
to athletic games. To-day Hercules is the pop- 


90 


Health and Success 


ular deity, he has driven Minerva from our col¬ 
lege halls and reigns solitary and supreme. 
Baseball is more popular than grand opera and 
a prize fight draws more attention than the rise 
or fall of a cabinet minister. We no longer wor¬ 
ship in the temple of learning, but bow down 
before Muscle in the roped arena or the grid¬ 
iron field, but perhaps better this extreme than 
the indifference that formerly characterized us 
and gave us a nation of weak chests, deficient 
lungs and flabby muscles. Many may deplore 
athletics gone mad, but even this is better than 
the old-time antagonism that looked upon a 
ruddy cheek as a sign of depravity. 

Now-a-days the stalwart physique crowds 
every vocation and storms every gateway of 
progress. The two absolutely necessary attrib¬ 
utes to reach the heights of success are strength 
and character, the former to be shaped by the 
latter. Manhood needs to be muscular and the 
muscle needs to be manly. But brain is more 
than biceps and the will more precious than the 
fore-arm. Better a will that can resolve like 
Napoleon or persevere like Washington, than 
the power to lift a thousand pounds avoirdupois 
or swim the English Channel. 


91 


CHAPTER XIII. 

HURRY AS A SUCCESS KILLER. 

When Perseus told Pallas Athene that he 
wanted to go forth to meet Medusa the monster, 
the lady smiled and said: “You are too young, 
my child, too unskillful; return home and do the 
work awaiting you there. ’ ’ Good advice! 

Too many of us attempt the work for which 
we are unfitted, hence the great number of fail¬ 
ures in all walks of life. Many a poor doctor 
would make a first-rate carpenter, while many 
a botch at the bench could make an immortal 
name for himself in the world of medicine or 
surgery. You can never fit a round man into 
a square hole or a square one into a round hole, 
and it is much worse than useless to make the 
attempt, for it will result in failure. No one can 
successfully war against nature. A silk purse 
cannot be made from a pig’s ear. Without the 
right kind of timber you cannot construct a sea¬ 
worthy boat, nor can you build a house with a 
single material. So with life. Certain quali¬ 
ties must be present in the individual to insure 
success along any line. The trouble with Amer- 


92 


Hurry as a Success Killer 

icans is, that they will not take time to draw 
out those qualities and use them in the right 
direction. Hurry and bustle, noise and confus¬ 
ion, rush and roar are characteristics of our 
national life to-day. It is a good thing to he 
progressive, to have a go-ahead spirit, to push 
on and even crush on to the front, but we should 
keep in mind that rush and push do not consti¬ 
tute the best policy at all times. Indeed the 
old Scotch proverb comes in true in many cases, 
—“The maur haste the waur speed.” 

Americans are in haste all the time—they are 
in a hurry to work, a hurry to rest, a hurry to 
eat, a hurry to dress and a hurry to sleep, they 
go all through life in a hurry and in the end die 
in a hurry, for their natural forces are so spent 
that they fall almost in their tracks before they 
realize that death is near. The vital statistics 
show that but a very small part of the popula¬ 
tion die of lingering diseases. Most of the peo¬ 
ple are cut off in a few days’ sickness. Men 
and women drop dead on the streets; heart- 
failure is given as the cause, which is simply 
another name for exhausted vitality. 

As Shakespeare says—“Men perish in ad¬ 
vance as if the sun should set ere noon.” 

Like Atlas we seem to carry the world on our 
shoulders, and think, if we stop, that it will top¬ 
ple off into space. No! we do not think, we do 


93 


The Strenuous Career 


not take time to think about the matter at all, 
we just go on and on for fear the world would 
come to grief if we stopped. We madly rush 
forward, lighting our candles at both ends as 
well as in the middle to see ahead. No wonder 
they burn out pretty soon. 

The first words the newcomer hears as he 
lands upon our shores are “Step lively,’’ and 
they ring in his ears all the time he remains in 
the country. Every one is stepping lively from 
the liveried messenger boy, rushing with his 
calls, to the gray-haired septuagenarian speed¬ 
ing to his bank to pile up millions for those that 
will come after him, but who will not even thank 
him for the lively stepping. 

When the foreigner for the first time looks 
upon the surging thoroughfares of our cities and 
watches the scurrying crowds rush hither and 
thither, he naturally inquires where the fire is, 
and is dumbfounded with astonishment when 
he learns that the people are simply hurrying 
about their business. It is all business, business 
with Americans, and they are so busy trying 
to keep abreast of it, that they have very little 
time for the amenities of life. Their motto is 
Longfellow’s stanza— 

“Let us then be up and doing 
With a heart for any fate, 

Still achieving, still pursuing, 

Learn to labor and to wait. ” 


94 



HURRY AS A SUCCESS KILLER. 























































































































































































































































Hurry as a Success Killer 

Save that they eliminate the last phrase. They 
learn to labor, bnt never to wait. Like time and 
tide, Americans wait for no man. They will 
not even wait for themselves, trying to emulate 
the man who ran so quickly around a tree that 
he caught sight of his own back. 

They are not only in a hurry, but they also 
overdo everything. They eat too much, they 
dress too much, they indulge in pleasures too 
much and they are guilty of too much extrava^ 
gance in nearly all things. They hurry and rush 
and bustle to amass, and then turn round and in 
as big a hurry recklessly waste and squander in 
foolish and health-destroying excesses and in¬ 
ane pleasures. They go in summer to the sea¬ 
shore and the mountains, and instead of build¬ 
ing up their health, break it down, and return in 
a state of lassitude and enervation really pitia¬ 
ble. Physicians will tell you that their services 
are in greater demand after the holidays than 
at any other period of the year. 

All the time, however, the spirit of restless¬ 
ness broods over the nation, hatching nervous¬ 
ness and physical degeneracy into life, with the 
result, that the people become inoculated with 
the baneful virus and succumb to its effects. 

The racking, rushing, never-ending grind is 
an American disease both endemic and epidemic 


97 


The Strenuous Career 


and may well be called “ Americanitis.” It at¬ 
tacks all, from the youngest to the oldest and no 
one is immune from its encroach. The school¬ 
boy and the school-girl suffer from it as well as 
their parents. Youths are pitch-forked through 
college at the present time, so great is the ambi¬ 
tion to join the giddy whirl of the money-makers 
in the temple of Mammon. Education is cram¬ 
med into them just as grain is crammed into 
the crops of fowl to fatten them for the Christ¬ 
mas markets, but as such grain is not conducive 
to the health of the fowl, neither is the cram¬ 
ming system of 'education beneficial to the stu¬ 
dents as mental food. It does not even fatten 
them in learning for the time being, not to speak 
of a permanent value. But as the fowl must be 
prepared for the market some way, so the young 
must be prepared for the scramble of life, 
which is more like a football scrimmage than a 
sane method of complying with the rules of God 
and nature. 

In the business sections of the cities at the 
noon hour you can see some lively sprinting to 
get at the quick lunch counters, where men and 
women bolt the food like starving hyenas in 
order to get back to their places in the wild race 
whose terminal is nought but the grave. These 
people are like human locomotives with the 


98 


Hurry as a Success Killer 

steam ever up and the wheels ever revolving 
until the water in the boilers becomes ex¬ 
hausted ; then there is a break-down on the road 
and the old engine is thrown on the junk heap 
of oblivion. 

In the frenzied whirl we try to annihilate time 
and space. Our fathers thought twenty miles 
an hour rapid transit, we are not content with a 
velocity of sixty. Twenty years ago it required 
ten and twelve days to cross the ocean, now we 
make the trip in five, and soon steamships will 
be too slow altogether for us, we shall only be 
content with air-ships. We are looking for¬ 
ward to the time when we will glance over the 
morning paper to find out where the weather 
will be finest for that day within a radius of a 
thousand miles, then order down our aerial 
wings to waft us to the desired spot. 

Electricity girdles the world in the flash of an 
eye. We thought we had achieved the limit 
when we linked shore to shore with the tele¬ 
graph wire, now we can stand on one continent 
and talk to our friends on another over the waste 
of waters without using a wire at all. We do 
not despair of soon making a trip to the moon 
or having a chat with our neighbors on the 
planet Mars. We have revolutionized our own 
little earth; soon it will he too small for us and 
we will sigh for more worlds to conquer. 


99 


The Strenuous Career 


The great characteristic of our age of haste 
is lack of anything solid or substantial in the 
work accomplished. Much is flimsy and tran¬ 
sient with a view to please the eye only. The 
masonry of the sewers and aqueducts built by 
the ancient Romans are as solid today as in the 
days of the Caesars, because their foundations 
were laid on rocks of adamant and years were 
spent on their construction. We try only for 
exterior beauty and think nothing of interior 
solidity. Everything now-a-days is made to 
sell. Wheat is sold before it is sown and chick¬ 
ens before they are hatched, and by the way, so 
great is the hurry to get the chickens that in 
many cases they are not hatched in the natural 
way, but forced into life with electricity. 

It is good to be in a hurry when the occasion 
demands, for in modern life, the race almost al¬ 
ways goes to the swift of foot, but we can be in 
too much of a hurry, the hurry which puts to 
flight all the joys and sweetness and brightness 
of life, the hurry which leads through the por¬ 
tals of broken health to the dark shadows of an 
early tomb. 

Nerve specialists say that suicides are the re¬ 
sult of exhausted brain-cells. When conscious 
that zest in life is evaporating, that life itself is 
becoming a bore, go out into the woods and sleep 


100 


Hurry as a Success Killer 


and recuperate until the old enthusiasm returns, 
until you enjoy existence as the lambs and 
calves that chase one another over the fields and 
meadows and pastures, and as healthy, happy 
hoys do when they glide over fields of ice in the 
crisp air of a winter day. 


101 


CHAPTER XIV. 


WORRY AS A SUCCESS KILLER. 

Worry saps nervous energy and robs the body 
of the strength necessary for the real work of 
life. It is wholly bad, for it never counteracts 
with the slightest good any of the evil it accom¬ 
plishes. Never has it been known to benefit but 
always, on the contrary, to injure. It is an in¬ 
sidious enemy which works even while we sleep 
in the land of dreams, twisting and distorting 
the beautiful visions of that land into horrible, 
hideous, grinning things, whose memory haunts 
us in our waking hours. It fags the brain, 
wrinkles the brow, dulls the eyes, withers the 
cheek, enfeebles the hands, enervates the arms, 
palsies the limbs and places the crown of age 
on the brow of youth. With one hand it points 
the way to the lunatic asylum and with the other 
beckons onward to the suicide’s grave. It is 
the inflexible, implacable enemy of success, 
which ever succumbs to its onslaught and which 
it buries in the dust of despair never to rise 
again. 

Poise is necessary for the well-being of man, 


102 


Worry as a Success Killer 

it develops and at the same time controls, and 
keeps the lever of mental equilibrium so ad¬ 
justed in its proper place, that the balance wheel 
will not get out of running gear to the wrong 
side. 

The man who worries is never self-centered, 
never balanced, never at his best. Mental anx¬ 
iety takes away vitality and push and leaves 
lassitude and languor behind. It deprives man¬ 
hood of virility and womanhood of the strength 
required to fulfill her place as wife and mother 
and discharge the duties of her station in life, 
whereas the self-poised man and woman have 
confidence in themselves to dare and do, they 
never wabble or stagger from side to side, but 
push right ahead in a straight course, keeping 
their destiny ever in view. 

They who believe in themselves, who are con¬ 
scious of their own force of character, of brain 
and of body, touch the wire of infinite power 
and can accomplish what would be utterly im¬ 
possible to those who lack the vital energy which 
waits on self-concentration and knows not 
worry. There is enough of this vital energy 
wasted in useless, harmful worry to run all the 
affairs of the world. 

The greatest friend, as well as the worst en¬ 
emy of success, resides within yourself. Look 


103 


The Strenuous Career, 


on the dark side of life, walk in the gloom, mope 
in the shade, predict failure, anticipate trouble, 
and you will attract evils as honey attracts flies 
in the summer, for troubles have a natural af¬ 
finity, one for the other. They are like a nest 
of hornets; you should avoid them, for once you 
prick one, all fly out to thrust their venomous 
stings in every point open to attack. There¬ 
fore, good advice is— 

4 ‘ Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles 
you.” 

Gloomy forebodings come home to roost; they 
love a dark perch and this they can readily find 
in the brain that is given to worry. Loathesome 
creatures, such as toads, lizards, beetles and 
vipers love dark cellars and avoid the sunlight; 
let in the health-giving, disease-destroying, 
bright and beautiful rays and they scamper to 
their holes, there to remain in the darkness un¬ 
til the light is gone. Let in the rays of light, of 
hope, of trust, of confidence to your brain and 
they will dispel the ill-omened ghouls of worry 
which have taken up their abode there, they will 
lighten it and brighten it, giving birth to har¬ 
monious, healthy thoughts which shall invigor¬ 
ate both mind and body and clear the way of ev¬ 
ery obstacle which lies in the path of success. 
Bright, hopeful thoughts, belief in one’s ability 
to succeed will insure success. 


104 


Worry as a Success Killer 

Complain of yonr hard luck and you will poi¬ 
son the atmosphere of your surroundings by 
pictures of failure which you create in your 
mind. You can’t plant night-shades and grow 
roses,—like produces like. Sour seed sown will 
produce its own peculiar crop, hut good seed 
planted always gives a ripe fruition and an 
abundant harvest. 

Remember that there are two sides to every¬ 
thing, the one towards the light, and the other 
towards the shade. No matter how black a cloud 
may appear to earth, the side towards the sun 
is as white as a pack of carded wool, and 
if you just have patience to wait awhile and 
not worry, you will see the black side of the 
cloud turning white as soon as the sun’s rays 
strike the earth and are reflected back. 

We often anticipate disasters that never come. 
Worry breeds fearsome things, but they exist 
only in the abstract and can never tangibly 
materialize unless courted into life by discon¬ 
tent, despondency and pessimism. Then the 
disasters that are dreaded come, because worry 
and anxiety have so enfeebled the powers of the 
mind, so lowered the forces of resistance, that 
their victims fall to earth when they might eas¬ 
ily have conquered their foes. 

No man can accomplish anything until he 


105 


The Strenuous Career 


believes he can. When you doubt your ability, 
you begin to waver, become uncertain as to your 
course, liable to strike a rock and finally go to 
the bottom. Doubt and disbelief in yourself 
frightens away determination, puts courage to 
flight, courts disappointment and woos failure. 

Entertain no thought of defeat, marshal your 
forces, put them in charge of those three in¬ 
vincible officers, “I will,” “I can,” and “I 
must,’ ’ and you need not fear, but you will win 
a glorious victory and plant your standard on 
the sun-kissed heights of success. 

Put all your past failures behind you, forget 
them, let the dead past bury its dead, don’t cry 
over spilt milk; yesterday’s flowers will never 
bloom again; last year’s apples are Dead-Sea 
fruit; the spoken word can’t be recalled and the 
hour-glass of time when its sands are run can 
never be re-filled. The Past is behind, the Fu¬ 
ture ahead. Forget the one, look with hope to 
the other. It is as important to learn to let go 
as it is to hold on. Let go what can’t help you, 
cling to that which can. You can make the fu¬ 
ture bright and happy if you will. It lies with 
yourself to do so. Think success, read success, 
believe in success and success will surely be 
yours. All the great men and women who have 
accomplished mighty deeds and benefitted the 


106 


Worry as a Success Killer 


world have been firm believers in themselves. 
In their lexicon was not found the word, ‘ ‘ fail, ’ ’ 
because they eliminated it, and kept ever in sight 
the shining goal of success, which they reached 
by faith and hope, diligence and perseverance, 
and above all, confidence in their own powers. 
Emulate them and you will succeed. 


107 


CHAPTER XV. 

DRUDGERY AND SUCCESS. 

Nothing great has ever been accomplished in 
the world without hard work, and what people 
in their simplicity call genius is merely the knack 
of putting one’s shoulder to the wheel of life 
and never taking it therefrom until inch by inch 
and step by step you have rolled it up the steep 
hill on whose crest is the mansion of Success. 

Genius is mainly the capability to work, to 
work hard, unremittingly and unceasingly un¬ 
til your object is attained. 

We hear and read of intellectual giants, in¬ 
dustrial giants and giants in every field of ac¬ 
tion, but if we take time to analyze their lives 
and works, we will find that they were not giants 
at all,—just ordinary individuals like ourselves, 
save that they so trained themselves and so dom¬ 
inated their wills, that they availed themselves 
of every possible moment of time they could 
and put it to good use, while others were stand¬ 
ing idly by, letting the golden gems of time slip 
through their fingers, never realizing that once 
lost they were lost forever and that no art or 
device could recover them. 


108 


Drudgery and Success 


If a man sets out on a journey with a certain 
objective point in view and at intervals sits 
down by the roadside to rest himself, or if he 
has a chat with every individual he meets, he 
cannot expect to reach his destination as quickly 
or as soon as the man who started for the same 
goal, hut who did not tarry on the way or allow 
his neighbors to detain him. The most mediocre 
of men can attain great things and he looked 
upon as geniuses if they only try,—it is the want 
of trying that keeps them behind when others 
push to the front and causes them to write their 
name on water when they might have carved it 
on porphyry. 

What costs a man little is usually worth lit¬ 
tle. Examine into the great lives and you will 
find the amount of toil that lies behind them is 
immense and that every laurel in their crowns 
was placed there by downright, honest, hard 
work, at the expense of body or brain. 

Walter Raleigh was a man who gave the im¬ 
pression of achieving things with ease, yet it 
was of Raleigh that Queen Elizabeth said,—“he 
could toil terribly.’’ Much of the world’s hard 
work has been done under the pressure of pov¬ 
erty. Dr. Johnson wrote “Rasselas” in order 
to raise money to bury his mother. Lee in¬ 
vented the spinning-jenny to earn bread for his 
children. 


109 


The Strenuous Career 


Drudgery, that is, work in itself not pleasant, 
establishes the habit of work which alone can 
make high achievements possible. Carlyle was a 
good example of the pains and gains of drudg¬ 
ery ; he always spoke of literature as an uncon¬ 
genial trade, for he obtained its prizes only at 
the expense of almost inconceivable labor; his 
books were literally wrung out of him; he went 
twenty times over the confused records of the 
Battle of Naseby to be quite sure as to the topo¬ 
graphy. Dante wrote his great epic under in¬ 
tense strain; he could take no rest from the time 
he conceived the work and every waking mo¬ 
ment was devoted to evolving situations to suit 
his sublime conceptions, so that before the “Di¬ 
vine Comedy ’’ was completed he had grown 
old and lean, a corporeal shadow amid the shad¬ 
ows of his brain. 

Alfred the Great, the Saxon king of Britain, 
was a paragon of attainments for his time and 
shed as great a lustre over the 9th century as 
Charlemagne did over the 8th. When asked 
how he found time to accomplish the multifari¬ 
ous tasks he set himself, he answered: “I find 
time by never losing it.” And this reply is also 
the answer to the riddle of success. The suc¬ 
cessful men of the world found time by never 
losing it; at an early age they realized that the 


no 


Drudgery and Success 


mill cannot be turned with the water that is past. 
All the great men of our own day are hard work¬ 
ers. It was hard work that built a strong body 
for Theodore Roosevelt and so brought him to 
the Presidential chair. 

There may be such things in the world as luck 
and chance, but wise men never take a risk on 
them,—they make their own luck and get their 
own chance. If you sit down and wait till some¬ 
thing comes your way, it is very probable that 
that something will go the other way and you 
can sit there as long as you please. 

You must be up and doing, utilizing every 
minute of your time if you would be successful. 
Never put off: procrastination is the thief of 
time; you have no lease on the future and to¬ 
morrow’s sun may never dawn for you. Don’t 
linger in the road of Bye-and Bye, for if you do 
it will bring you to the town called “Never” 
and drop you into the ocean of eternity as you 
cross its threshold, with your hopes unfulfilled, 
your ambitions unrealized, your life altogther 
negative. 

Some may think that constant work will make 
a man a drudge without any pleasure in the 
world at all,—so it would if the man did not 
train himself to have an aptitude and a love for 
the work, which all can do, and then the drudg¬ 
ery in itself becomes a kind of pleasure. In 


111 


The Strenuous Career 


the end we may all be divided into two classes, 
the drones and the drudges, or the idlers and the 
workers,—the drudges or the workers “get 
there,’ 9 the drones or the idlers are left behind 
in the race. 

Constant dropping wears away the hardest 
stones and constant drudging can accomplish 
wonders. Slow as is the pace at which a snail 
travels, in time it could reach Jerusalem. If 
you get tired at one thing take up something 
else equally as useful. Some men get relaxation 
from one labor by taking up another,—try to be 
so enamoured of your work, that you won’t get 
tired; try to fall in love with your work and be 
an ardent wooer. John Adams became tired of 
his Latin lessons and asked his father to ex¬ 
cuse him from them. “Certainly, John,” said 
the father, “instead you may dig some ditches 
—the bog needs draining.” Digging was so 
productive of reflection by that first night that 
young John begged permission to resume his 
Latin on the morrow. He became one of the 
pillars of the Revolution and the successor of 
Washington as President. 

Cyrus Field entered A. T. Stewart’s store as 
an errand boy at $50 a year; he said he was 
there before the partners came in the morning 
and did not leave until after they had gone in 
the evening; then he spent every evening in the 


113 


Drudgery and Success 

Mercantile Library and joined a debating so¬ 
ciety ; he was rewarded for his faithfulness, and 
his example is worthy of imitation. A. T. Stew¬ 
art himself owed his success to downright 
drudgery. John Wanamaker walked four miles 
every day to Philadelphia and worked in a book¬ 
store for $1.25 a week. 

It was to drudgery that the old masters owed 
their success and fame. Angelo studied anat¬ 
omy twelve years, posting himself on every 
curve and convolution and angle and elevation 
and depression of the human body, and this 
drudgery determined his style. In painting he 
prepared his own colors; neither servants nor 
students dare mix them. Raphael, who died at 
the early age of thirty-seven, gained his success 
by keeping constantly at his chosen profession. 
“I’ve made it my principle,’* said he, “never 
to neglect anything.” DaVinci often went to 
work at daybreak and did not come down from 
the scaffolding to eat or drink till the light had 
left him. Millais said, ‘ ‘ I work harder than any 
plowman; my advice to boys is—‘work.’ ” 
Charles Darwin collected his facts with almost 
incredible care and perseverance. On one of 
his subjects—the action of the earth-worm in 
the formation of the mold—he spent a period of 
forty-four years from its commencement to pub¬ 
lication. Peter the Great won his real crown 


113 


The Strenuous Career 


and throne by sturdy toil. Demosthenes was 
hissed and hooted as a stutterer and a stam¬ 
merer; he went down to the beach, filled his 
mouth with pebbles and practiced shouting to 
the rocks until he became the greatest orator of 
all time. Plato wrote the first sentence in his 
‘ 4 Republic’’ nine times before he had it to suit 
him. Gibbon rewrote the first chapter of ‘ ‘ The 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’’ ten 
times and spent twenty-five years on the whole 
work. Rufus Choate declared that success was 
not an accident, “you might as well let drop a 
Greek alphabet and expect to pick up the Iliad. ’ ’ 

Drudgery is the secret of success every time. 
The old German inscription on a key, “If I rest 
I rust,”—is as true of men as it is of the iron 
in the key. To be bright and shining, to be suc¬ 
cessful and consequently happy, we must keep 
ourselves polished with the oil of work. 

One of the chief lessons young men must learn 
is the nobleness of drudgery, doing that which 
may not have any immediate effect in stimulat¬ 
ing the best powers, and which may but re¬ 
motely serve the purpose of general advance¬ 
ment. It is our business to contribute to the 
general wealth of life—others sacrifice for us— 
and the one who ignores his obligations to serve 
his generation is a traitor to the race. 


134 


CHAPTER XVI. 

THE VICTORIES OF YOUTH. 

Youth is the time for accomplishment, though 
many great achievements can be put to the ac¬ 
count of those who had passed the meridian 
of life, before they made their mark in the 
world. Franklin did not commence his phil¬ 
osophical experiments until he had reached his 
forty-sixth year; Wellinton fought the battle 
of Waterloo at the same age, and Grant re¬ 
ceived the surrender of Lee when he was three 
years younger; at forty-seven Nelson had won 
a peerage by his gallantry at Trafalgar. Co¬ 
lumbus was fifty-four before he discovered 
America, Lincoln did not crown his matchless 
career until he was fifty-three, when he emanci¬ 
pated the slave. Cromwell was fifty-five when 
he refused the crown of England. Galvani made 
his discovery at the age of fifty-two. Milton was 
fifty-seven when his great work, “Paradise 
Lost,” appeared. Goethe, completed “Faust” 
when eighty years old. Da Vinci painted the 
greatest picture of all time, “The Last Sup¬ 
per,” when he was seventy-seven. Michel An¬ 


ns 


The Strenuous Career 


gelo raised the cupola of St. Peter’s when he 
was eighty-seven. Palmerston died Prime 
Minister of England at the age of eighty-one. 
Bismark at eighty was a controlling power in 
European politics. Gladstone did his best 
work when he was beyond the four score mark. 
Sophocles wrote Oedipus at eighty. Cato, at 
eighty, learned the Greek language that he 
might talk back to his mother-in-law. Many of 
the greatest of America’s literary men did 
their best work with the shadows of the tomb 
lengthening around them on account of old 
age, notably among them being Longfellow, 
Bryant, Holmes and "Whittier. Hundreds of 
cases might be adduced to show that none but 
the sickly and the physically incapacitated need 
despair, or say they are too old to learn, or that 
they have outlived their usefulness. 

But it is to the victories of youth, more re¬ 
nowned than those of age, that I would call at¬ 
tention. Youth is the table-land of activity on 
which the foundations of success are laid whose 
corner stones may be said to begin on the one 
side at the age of twenty and terminate on the 
other at the age of sixty, thus giving forty as 
the medium or key-stone on which the principal 
arch of success rests. This is certainly the most 
active age of man, and one when he should be 


116 


The Victories of Youth 


at his very best, both physically and mentally, 
though some, indeed many, have won their hon¬ 
ors in the race of life before they have come to 
the two-score milestone. 

At fifteen, Victor Hugo presented a poem to 
the academy and Bossuet, at the same age, daz¬ 
zled all who heard him by the fluency of his elo¬ 
quence. At sixteen, Pascal wrote a treatise on 
the Conic Sections, and Bacon had pointed out 
the errors in Aristotle’s philosophy. 

At seventeen, Mozart was entertaining the 
Court of Germany, and Washington Irving de¬ 
lighting the readers of the Morning Chronicle . 
Mendelssohn produced the beautiful “Midsum¬ 
mer Night’s Dream” and Bryant his poetical 
phenomenon of “Thanatopsis,” when each was 
eighteen. 

Charles XII., king of Sweden, with 10,000 
troops routed 50,000 Russians under Peter the 
Great, at Narva, when he was nineteen; at the 
same age George Washington was a major. 

At twenty Weber was producing symphonies; 
Schelling had grappled with the philosophy of 
Kant; Galileo had discovered the use of the pen¬ 
dulum, and Lafayette was a Major-General. At 
twenty-one Beethoven was famed as a musician; 
Alexander stood at the head of his army on the 
plains of Thessaly and Tasso had begun his 
117 


The Strenuous Career 


immortal poem of “Jerusalem Delivered.’’ At 
twenty-two Paul Potter painted “The Young 
Bull,” now in the museum at The Hague, said 
to be one of the finest animal pictures on canvas; 
at the same age Campbell wrote his “Pleasures 
of Hope,” the work on which his fame as a poet 
rests. 

Browning wrote “Paracelsus” at twenty- 
three. Bailey gave us “Festus” when no older, 
and Wagner had written liis wonderful musical 
composition, “Lohengrin,” at the same age. 
Emmet thrilled Ireland with his pathetic patri¬ 
otism before his twenty-third year and Michel 
Angelo had completed ‘ ‘ Pieta, ’ ’ his masterpiece 
in marble. It was also at this age that Newton 
made his discovery of the law of gravitation. 

At twenty-four William Pitt was Chancellor 
of the Exchequer; Ruskin had written his 
“Modern Painters” in five volumes, which es¬ 
tablished his reputation as England’s greatest 
art critic, and Sheridan had produced “The 
Rivals,” at the same stage on life’s journey. 

At twenty-five Aeschylus was the most fa¬ 
mous poet of Greece, Coleridge had finished the 
marvelous metrical poem of “The Ancient 
Mariner” and Don John of Austria had won 
Lepanto. 

At twenty-six Howe invented the sewing ma¬ 


ns 


The Victories of Youth 


chine; Roger Williams had aroused all the in¬ 
tolerance of New England, and proved himself 
the pioneer of religious liberty and the first type 
of a true American. Benjamin Franklin had 
written his best philosophical work, “Poor 
Richard ”; at the same age Mark Antony was 
the hero of Rome; Hannibal was in command of 
the entire Carthaginian army and John Wes¬ 
ley had identified Methodism with one of the 
world’s greatest denominations; it was also at 
twenty-six that Charles Dickens produced his 
best and most popular novel, “Oliver Twist.” 

At twenty-seven Eli Whitney invented the 
Cotton Gin, Calvin wrote his ‘ ‘ Institutes of the 
Christian Religion,” and Napoleon led his bril¬ 
liant Italian campaign. 

At twenty-eight, Raphael painted his master¬ 
piece, the Sistine Madonna; Thomas Moore 
wrote “Lalla Rookh” and Pollock his “Course 
of Time.” 

At twenty-nine, Scipio gained the battle of 
Zana and James Watt revolutionized the indus¬ 
tries of the earth by making steam the most 
powerful agency in the progress of mankind, 
by commercially uniting the nations. It was at 
the age of twenty-nine that Shelley died after 
enriching the world of literature with his un¬ 
rivalled poetry. 


119 


The Strenuous Career 


r At thirty, Luther broke the sable night of the 
sixteenth century; Charlemagne had made him¬ 
self master of the French and German Em¬ 
pires; Cortez gazed on the golden cupolas of 
Mexico; Alexander Hamilton had formulated 
our Federal Constitution; Horace Greeley had 
founded the New York Tribune and John How¬ 
ard Payne had sung his deathless song of 
< 1 Home, Sweet Home. ’ ’ 

At thirty-one, Rennie planned and built the - 
London Bridge; Lescot, the Louvre; Christo¬ 
pher Wren was commissioned to rebuild St, 
Paul’s London; Champollion announced his 
wonderful discovery of the Egyptian alphabet 
and Maurice of Saxony secured religious lib¬ 
erty for the Protestants in Germany by the 
memorable treaty of Passau. 

At thirty-two, Clive established British power 
in India; Rubens painted his “Descent of the 
Cross;” Sir Philip Sydney, one of the brightest 
figures of the Elizabethan age, died; Schiller 
published his history of the Thirty Years’ War, 
recognized as the best historical work of Ger¬ 
many and Joseph Story became Chief Justice of 
the Supreme Court of the United States. 

At thirty-three, Napoleon was Emperor of 
France; Phil. Sheridan rode on a foaming steed 
twenty miles, seized his retreating army and 
hurling it upon Early, snatched victory out of 


120 


The Victories of Youth 


the jaws of defeat, sending him, with his rebel¬ 
lious hosts, flying up the Valley of the Shenan¬ 
doah; Wolfe scaled the heights of Abraham at 
Quebec, dispossessed the French of their pos¬ 
sessions in Canada and gave two provinces to 
England; Correggio had produced his three 
world-renowned pictures, “The Assumption of 
the Virgin / 9 “Ecce Homo,” and “The Penitent 
Magdalen;” George Stephenson made his first 
locomotive; Edison had harnessed electricity to 
the uses of man; Gray wrote his “Elegy;” Poe 
his “Raven” and Thomas Jefferson the “Dec¬ 
laration of Independence.” Byron died at 
thirty-six and Burns at thirty-seven. 

Such are some of the young men of yesterday; 
their success before forty is an inspiration to the 
young men of today. Who shall take up the 
work fallen from their lifeless hands? There 
are fresh victories still to be won, as important 
as those already achieved. It is for the young 
men of our day to emulate the example of the 
brothers who have gone before. They are the 
trustees of posterity. Therefore, let them robe 
themselves with purpose, face the future man¬ 
fully and enter upon the work that lies before 
them with undaunted courage and unfaltering 
trust. 


121 


CHAPTER XVII. 


TACT VS. TALENT. 

Tact is the compass which points the way for 
the good ship Talent to reach the port of suc¬ 
cess. The vessel is sound from prow to stern, 
the keel is burnished, the machinery in perfect 
working order, the masts and spars of strong¬ 
est timbers, she answers the helm at every turn, 
but without the compass to guide her course, 
the helmsman knows not whither he is steering 
and at any moment may drive her on the rocks 
or on a hidden sand-bar and so send her to de¬ 
struction, but with the compass set and the nee¬ 
dle true to the pole, he can guide her unerringly 
to the right port and safe anchorage. 

Tact guides talent. The latter in itself is val¬ 
uable, but it requires the former to put a pre¬ 
mium on the value. 

Talent is a man with money but who does not 
know how to use it until tact comes along and 
shows him the way in which to dispose of it to 
the best advantage. The talented man fails, 
the tactful man, never. Talent is power; tact, 
skill; talent knows what to do; tact knows how 


122 


Text vs. Talent 


to do it. Theorists talk; practical men act. 
Philosophy is good enough in its own way, but 
its principles must be applied, put in force to 
realize results. Talent elevates a man to a 
plane above his fellows, but if he has not tact to 
back it, he will not retain his elevation long; he 
will soon tumble to a depth lower than that of 
any upon whom he looked down. Talent takes 
a back seat; tact pushes to the front; talent sets 
out upon a journey; tact gets there ahead; tal¬ 
ent sells a man what he wants; tact, what he does 
not want. 

Intellectual culture may be purchased at the 
expense of moral vigor. It is possible to be so 
rounded and cultured and refined that the indi¬ 
vidual faculties sutler and there is energy in 
none. Mother wit very often beats Alma Mater. 
The best diploma is the book of acts, and is more 
valuable than any sheepskin. The world wants 
and respects the man, who can accomplish 
things, put his thoughts and words into actions 
and show results. The education that cannot 
grapple with life’s problems is incomplete, in 
fact, is not -education in its true meaning. A 
young college man had received a check from 
his father and presented it at the bank for pay¬ 
ment. The cashier informed him that he would 
have to endorse the check, whereupon, the young 


123 


The Strenuous Career 

man took out his fountain pen and wrote: “I 
heartily endorse this check.’’ 

Another youth boasted of his being a grad¬ 
uate of two universities. His father took him 
into his business, but the learned (?) son showed 
little aptitude for a commercial life and made 
several blunders. The parent took him to task 
and severely lectured him. The son did not 
take kindly to the paternal reprimand. “Do 
you realize, sir,” he irefully exclaimed, “that 
I am a graduate of two universities?” “What 
of that,” rejoined the father, “I once had a calf 
that milked two cows, and the more it milked 
them the greater calf it became.” 

The world’s greatest men have not been pol¬ 
ished scholars. Many of the .world’s best 
achievements have been brought about by men 
who had little or no book learning. The men 
who wrested Magna Charta and laid the foun¬ 
dations of civil liberty could not write their own 
names. Bolingbroke, scholar and statesman, 
fled an exile from England, while Walpole, who 
scorned literature, held power for thirty years. 
The speeches of Benjamin D’Israeli were lit¬ 
erary luxuries, polished by the rhetoric of ge¬ 
nius, but they never laid down a single principle 
of policy, nor did their talented author ever 
bring forward a great measure, that was not 

124 



TACT vs. TALENT. 

SELF-MADE FATHER AND COLLEGE-MADE SON. 


























































































































































































































































































tr 










































































Tact vs. Talent 


ignominiously rejected, hooted out of the House, 
while Sir Robert Peel, whose orations at best 
were hut platitudes, and whose quotations were 
usually from Eton’s grammar, reversed his 
country’s financial policy, regenerated Ireland 
and died with the blessings of all Englishmen 
on his head. Charlemagne could barely sign his 
own name. Frederick could not spell in any of 
the three languages whose words he habitually 
mispronounced. The strongest hand that held 
the helm of our government was that of a man 
who was horn in the backwoods, never went 
through a college and had hut little of the learn¬ 
ing of the masters; yet what master was as 
great as Abraham Lincoln? 

Books, as Bacon has justly observed, can 
never teach the use of hooks; it requires tact to 
do that. Bacon, though sagacious in study and 
a lucid thinker, had no business sense. The 
force of Addison’s genius gained for him the 
proud and enviable position of Home Secretary 
under the British Crown, hut he was incompe¬ 
tent to discharge the duties of the post and was 
compelled to solicit his own dismissal and a pen¬ 
sion of 1,500 pounds ($7,500) a year. Cowper 
was one of England’s best poets, a man of ex¬ 
traordinary ability, hut he hopelessly bungled 
his own affairs. Beethoven, music’s master, 
whose fingers made him a fortune, did not know 


127 


The Strenuous Career 


enough to cut the coupon from a bond when he 
wanted money, he put in the whole slip. Machie- 
velli, consummate master of all tricks and strat¬ 
agems of politics, was not clever enough to earn 
his own bread. Sir Isaac Newton, scientist and 
philosopher that he was, cut two holes through 
his door to give ingress and egress to the cat and 
her kitten, the big hole for the cat and the 
smaller one for the kitten; he had not the prac¬ 
tical sense to see that one hole was enough. 

It is possible to polish the mind too much by 
education; to make it so bright, so glittering 
that the slightest breath or rub against the 
world will dim its lustre ; in a word it can be too 
refined for action, just like the hair-spring of a 
delicately balanced watch; when the steel is too 
finely drawn out the movement is too fast and 
defeats the purpose of the mechanic. It is pos¬ 
sible for a college man to know just enough to 
prevent consciousness of his ignorance, and 
there are many who do not know even that much. 
Learning is not everything. There must be 
something more. There are some who merely 
skim the pool of knowledge and think they know 
as much, and more than those who have explored 
its depths. Pope wisely and tersely says: 

“Goethe at Weimar toiling to the last, 

Completed Faust when eighty years had past. ” 

‘ 1 A little learning is a dangerous thing— 

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.’ ; 


128 


Tact vs . Talent 


It does not necessarily require great learning 
to make a man successful in life; indeed very 
many of those who have carved their way to the 
front ranks, have been men of but mediocre edu¬ 
cation, or lacked book learning altogether, hut 
they had a natural talent and hacked it up with 
tact which showed them just what to do under 
the circumstances in which they were placed. In 
the modern system of education, the fact is com¬ 
monly overlooked, that it is better to have the 
mind well disciplined than richly stored. The 
mind is like a large store-room which can be 
filled with very valuable materials, but often so 
arranged that you cannot get what you want 
when you most desire it. The man who has 
his faculties so ordered that he can, at any time, 
bring forth what he needs at that particular 
time, is he who has cultivated tact and calls it 
to his aid in all difficulties. Tact is faculty of 
doing the right thing at the right time and place. 

I am not underestimating education as an im¬ 
portant factor in the progress and well-being of 
any individual, for education measures a man’s 
capacity to labor, gives him a stronger hold 
upon his mental forces, enables him to put forth 
his efforts to the best purpose, strengthens the 
capability for well-directed action and in al¬ 
most every way increases the facilities for get¬ 
ting along in the world. It alwys pays, in the 


The Strenuous Career 


end, to empty the pocket-book into the brain, for, 
like the sand in an upturned hours glass, it will 
flow back again. Learning cannot be discounted 
in any walk of life, in any trade or profession 
or avocation or calling. It is as useful to the 
street-sweeper in his own place as to the banker 
in his. The educated farmer can make two 
blades of grass grow where only one grew, and 
can make his crops give a better return than 
those of his neighbor who is handicapped by ig¬ 
norance. 

It is possible to have ability without availa¬ 
bility. Many people don’t know enough to take 
hold of things by the handles, they grasp them 
at the first point of contact, with the result that 
they have to let go quickly. Again many mis¬ 
take the use of their tools. You wouldn’t con¬ 
sider him a wise workman who would undertake 
to do with a shovel what requires the use of a 
spade. Yet many display such ignorance in 
their every-day work; they do not employ the 
right means of attaining their object in life. In 
meeting the daily tasks and difficulties they 
rely solely on mental or physical strength to ac¬ 
complish their ends, never taking into consid¬ 
eration the tact that is necessary to bring to a 
successful issue any work which is worthy of 
being accomplished. 

Business is built up by tact; without it the 


130 


Tact vs. Talent 


business-man can never hope to make any kind 
of a success in the commercial field. The law¬ 
yer needs it in the courts, the doctor needs it in 
his practice, the professor needs it in the class¬ 
room,—all need it at every turn and phase of 
life. It is the open eye, the quick ear, the judg¬ 
ing taste, the keen smell, the alert hand that is 
put forward to seize when the opportunity of¬ 
fers. Many a brainy fellow is begging for bread 
because he lacks this one indispensable quality 
of tact, whereas there are thousands who have 
not one-quarter of his talent or ability reaping 
rich harvests from the world, for the reason that 
they know how to use the sickle of tact to cut 
them down. 

China is among the oldest civilizations of the 
world; her people had arts and sciences when 
the now flourishing and boasted polities were 
sleeping in the night of barbarism and ignor¬ 
ance ; they knew the art of printing and the use 
of gunpowder ages before either was introduced 
to Western knowledge, but they did not know 
how to make use of their discoveries until others 
had to show them and so could not take full ad¬ 
vantage of their progress. It is the same with 
individuals as with the Chinese. Many do not 
know how to take advantage of their knowl¬ 
edge, to use it to their own and their neighbor’s 


131 


The Strenuous Career 


good, simply because they have not tact to do 
so. 

Tact is a child of necessity. People under 
tropical suns and where little clothing is needed, 
where food is found ready prepared, rarely ex¬ 
hibit a high state of civilization or progress, be¬ 
cause they have not the necessity to put their 
faculties to the test to make a living. The 
highest development is always found where men 
have to struggle hardest. 


132 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

KEEP YOUR IDEAL IN SIGHT. 

Without an ideal in life you are a ship with¬ 
out a helm and compass, tossing about at the 
mercy of wind and wave, drifting hither and 
thither, liable every moment to become sub¬ 
merged or dashed to pieces against some hidden 
rock. The port of success may be hard-by, but 
as there are no means of determining its loca¬ 
tion, she restlessly tosses onward, to finally 
meet destruction and sink from sight beneath 
the treacherous waters that wanton and gambol 
around her ere clasping her in their deadly em¬ 
brace. 

On the ocean of life, the harbor must con¬ 
stantly be regarded as the objective point, to 
reach which, every energy must be bent, every 
latent force called into action and every effort 
put forward to gain the desired haven. 

The mind is the compass, the body, the helm 
upon which we must depend to enable us to 
reach our destination, therefore it behooves us 
to guard both well, for if either is knocked out 
of gear there is bound to be a deviation in the 


133 


The Strenuous Career 


course, and once off the track it is difficult to 
get on it again. 

The man, also, who loses an ideal or has 
never had one, is like a person running a race 
on a dark night,—he does not know the right 
direction, nor is he aware of the obstacles that 
lie in his path. He is sure to stumble and may 
never reach his goal. 

The ideal must always be kept in sight, and 
it should be a high ideal, a noble ideal and one 
which is practical and can be realized, not a 
chimerical fancy away in the clouds of the Im¬ 
possible. 

It is not given to all to be geniuses, to soar to 
the highest peaks and look down from the eyrie 
of fame on the rest of the world plodding along 
in the valleys of the Commonplace below. Ge¬ 
niuses are few and far between, but really great 
men and women are common enough, and what 
makes them great ? The power to do things, to 
make the world better for their presence, to ben¬ 
efit and elevate their kind. They are the people 
who keep ideals in sight and who work and work 
hard to attain them. After all, genius is but 
another name for hard work. When a man 
makes a distinguished name for himself, does 
something out of the ordinary, you are apt to 
exclaim,—“Oh, he’s a genius.” Not at all. He 


134 


Keep Your Ideal in Sight 


is simply a hard worker. He has the capacity 
for doing things and he does them. You may 
have the capacity, too. You don’t know until 
you try. Poverty, oppression or any kind of 
difficulty cannot keep a good^man down. Nearly 
all our Presidents, and with few exceptions, the 
greatest of them, were born poor—very poor. 
Lincoln was a rail-splitter, Grant a tanner, Gar¬ 
field a mule-driver, yet who can say that these 
boys had not the White House in their minds’ 
eye from the time they came to realize that their 
glorious country spread the mantle of equality 
over all her children alike, and that the gates of 
Fame lay open to all who would enter their shin¬ 
ing portals. 

A little boy, one day, in the village of Green¬ 
ock, in Scotland, sat with his head between his 
hands, watching a kettle boiling on the fire while 
his mother was kneading the dough for griddle- 
cakes. The lid of the kettle began to move up 
and down under the pressure of the steam be¬ 
neath. At each rise and fall of the lid, the boy 
would say to himself,—“Jamie, mon, there’s 
power there.” Suddenly his mother turned 
around and giving him a stinging box on the ear, 
exclaimed,—“And Jamie, mon, there’s power 
there; to think of sic an idle ne ’er-do-well sitting 
by the fire while his puir, auld mither is a ’most 
deid frae work. ’ ’ Little did the honest woman 


135 


The Strenuous Career 


dream that the “idle ne’er-do-well,” afterwards 
the illustrious James Watt, was at that moment 
perfecting his ideal and inventing the steam en¬ 
gine. 

Another Scottish laddie, Thomas Carlyle, was 
born in the obscure village of Ecclefechan, in 
Roxburgh, where only himself and the minister 
could read the Bible, but he had an ideal,—he 
saw a chair waiting for him in the Temple of 
Fame and day and night and night and day he 
bent all his energies to secure that seat and 
never stopped until he occupied it as the great¬ 
est master of English literature. 

These sturdy, Scotch youngsters had ambi¬ 
tion, they had ideals, but, just like you, they did 
not know of what they were capable until they 
tried. 

Poverty, instead of a drawback, is often an 
advantage—a stimulus to action, an incentive to 
effort, a spur to advancement. All around us 
we see verifications of this statement—Cornelius 
Vanderbilt began life as a ferryman, John Ja¬ 
cob Astor as a dealer in skins, Guiseppe Sarto, 
a peasant’s son, rules the Catholic world as 
Pope Pius X. 

There is always need for a man to go higher 
and always room at the top. ‘ 4 Everything is 
crowded”—down-stairs. 

Do not envy the merits of another, but respect 


136 


Keep Your Ideal in Sight 

them and try to go higher yourself, try to be 
first, never rest satisfied,—those who are never 
quite satisfied are the doers, the men who ac¬ 
complish something and benefit both themselves 
and their kind. 

Aspire! Look up! “Hitch your wagon to a 
star!” To aim low is a crime. Belief in the 
heroic makes heroes. Keeping a high ideal in 
sight strengthens the mind, widens the thought, 
clears the vision and enlarges the manhood. 
When all your expectations are fulfilled you 
have crossed the dead-line. Thorwaldsen ex¬ 
claimed to a visitor,—“My genius is decaying.” 
“What do you mean?” asked his friends. 
“Why, here is my statue of Christ,” replied the 
great sculptor, “it is the first of my works I 
have ever felt satisfied with; until now my ideal 
has always been far beyond what I could exe¬ 
cute, hut it is so no longer; I shall never have a 
great ideal again.” 

Remember that you are something more than 
an animal; you are an immortal, therefore, let 
your aim he higher than to pander to animal ap¬ 
petites and pleasures. Elihu Burritt became 
one of the greatest scholars this land has known, 
yet he was ridiculed for his determination to 
realize his ideal. His master frowned upon his 
ambition, but he soon found that the hoy could 

137 


The Strenuous Career 


shoe a horse much quicker and better for his in¬ 
creased knowledge. Get all the knowledge you 
can; it is never a drug in the market, but on the 
contrary, has always a premium upon it. 

The idealists have improved the world, they 
have made it better, brighter and happier. The 
man who aims at the sky is apt to shoot higher 
than the man who singles out a tree for a tar¬ 
get. The discontent you feel comes from doing 
your work in the spirit of a drudge. It is the 
spirit in which the work is done that lends to 
labor its dignity and honor. 

Life is grand, noble, divine, God-like,—it is 
mean only to those who make it so. 

When work is cheerfully done and with an 
ideal in view, it transforms itself into a pleasure 
and beautifies, decorates and sweetens life. 

Be up then and doing, always keeping an ob¬ 
jective point in view. Don’t allow yourself to 
be the sport of fate or the plaything of destiny, 
—you can make your own fate and shape your 
own destiny. Lead an upright, honest, virtuous 
life, try to do all the good you can,—and such 
will merit fame enough for any man— 


* 1 Leaving behind yon no stain on your name, 

Look proudly to Heaven from the death-bed of Fame. ” 


138 


CHAPTER XIX. 

MANNEES AND SUCCESS. 

Good manners often do more for a man than 
money or influence. They open many a portal 
to the aspiring which would otherwise remain 
closed, and lead the way to recognition and suc¬ 
cess. The man of polish, of suave and courtly 
bearing has a much better chance of getting 
along in the world than the man of a rough, over¬ 
bearing disposition who endeavors to attain his 
ends by brute force regardless of the feelings 
or rights of others. Oil runs smoother than 
water every time and penetrates recesses where 
the other cannot enter and moreover keeps 
everything bright and shining and in good work¬ 
ing order while the water is liable to rust and 
corrode and wear out the machinery. 

The human wheels must be greased with the 
lubricant of good manners in order to wear well 
and avoid friction. They will be easier turned 
and consequently be able to cover more ground 
than if allowed to become clogged with bilious¬ 
ness and ill-humor, with grouching and growl¬ 
ing and general disagreeableness. Sunshine 


139 


The Strenuous Career 


irradiates both light and life around, while dark¬ 
ness casts gloom everywhere and is inimical to 
the vitality of being. 



Be sunny, be cheery, have a pleasant word 


slid a friendly greeting for all with whom you 
come in contact, be open, just, generous, affable 
in your business transactions and every-day life 
and you cannot fail of success. You will be sur¬ 
prised to find out how much agreeable manners 
contribute to success, and what a sesame they 
can give you into all ranks and all places. They 
admit you into the presence of royalty ‘itself 
and place you on an equality with kings. The 
courteous, well-mannered man can go anywhere; 
the boor is repulsed from every door. Coarse¬ 
ness, vulgarity, an ugly disposition lock the 
gates of friendly feeling, put up the bars before 
the warm heart of welcome, draw down the 
blinds on the windows of love and make all 
within cold and sinister and forbidding, whereas 
courtesy, cheerfulness, good breeding hold a 
pass-port to homes and hearts, gain an entree 
into every shrine and sanctuary of human fee 1 
ing and receive a cordial invitation to return. 



Manners make the man and man can deter-' 
mine the manners. Lord Chesterfield, the para¬ 
gon of excellence, well knew this when he said 
to his son,— 4 ‘All your Greek can never advance 


140 


Manners and Success 


yon, bnt yonr manner, if good, may.” A pleas¬ 
ing manner may gain yon fame, Greek roots 
alone never can. You may be able to repeat by 
rote the twenty-four books of the Iliad and re¬ 
cite the Odyssey, but be turned away from the 
door, while the man is taken in who can scarcely 
read the family prayer-book. 

An attractive every-day bearing is bred in 
years, not moments. Success gained by main 
force is often gained by great waste of power. 
You must carefully cultivate the flower of a 
pleasing address if you would nurture it into a 
thing of strength and beauty to withstand the 
heat of summer and the cold of winter—great 
care must be given, in order to make it a per¬ 
ennial plant; day by day you must watch and 
tend it. Yet everybody can train it if they will, 
and now-a-days it is almost a necessity to have 
it in your garden. 

Emerson says,—“Give a boy dress and ac¬ 
complishments and you give him the mastery of 
palaces wherever he goes. He has not the trou 7 
ble to earn or own them, they solicit him to en¬ 
ter and possess.” 

Good manners go farther than letters of rec¬ 
ommendation—like the gold standard, they are 
current the world around. 

The well-mannered man usually gets first 
place. A position is always open to him who 


141 


The Strenuous Career 


has a pleasing way; he can make himself twice 
as valuable as the gruff man, and attract while 
the other repels. Nobody likes to patronize ill- 
mannered people, they are shunned as much as 
possible by those who wish to walk on a smooth 
path and enjoy the amenities of life. Few of us 
like to walk in the shade of the cypresses, when 
a flower-spangled path is just beside, which, in¬ 
stead of leading to the tomb of failure, stretches 
onward in the sunlight to the goal of success. 

Good breeding counts in all walks of life, hut 
it is especially indispensable to the man in the 
public arena. Affability wins popular favor at 
every turn. To quote Chesterfield again: “Oil 
your mind and your manners to give them the 
necessary suppleness and flexibility,—strength 
alone will not do so.” 

Aaron Burr lost the Presidency by one vote, 
but he became Vice-President, outdistancing 
men of twice his character and ability, owing to 
his suave and courteous manners, his polished 
bearing and magnetic personality. 

Always keep polished; rust eats away and de¬ 
stroys. Don’t let ice-water get into your veins; 
keep the good, cheerful, warm blood coursing 
through them. A smiling countenance and kind 
words will do more for you than a fat pocket- 
book and the “pull” of your friends. Good 
manners have brought men to the front, while 


Manners and Success 


both money and “pull” have left them behind. 
Josephine’s fascinating manners did more for 
Napoleon than any dozen of his most loyal ad¬ 
herents. 

The art of pleasing may be said to be synony¬ 
mous with the art of rising in the world. Of 
course there have been some notable exceptions 
of men who surrounded themselves with a nim¬ 
bus of gloom after they emerged from the chrys¬ 
alis of genius, but these, after all, missed the 
brightness and the beauty of life. Michel 
Angelo was a stern, cold, forbidding man, and 
though people admired his works they did not 
admire himself; he had few friends and fame did 
not bring him happiness. Columbus was unso¬ 
cial and taciturn and to this disposition may be 
attributed the mutiny of his crews, which with 
difficulty was allayed on his voyage of discovery 
to the New World. Dante was never invited out 
to dinner in his life and during his exile from 
his home and his wanderings throughout his 
native land, was never welcomed at any fireside; 
he remained a hermit to his countrymen. 

On the contrary, the brilliant men who had 
warm hearts and polished manners worked their 
way into the love of the multitude. Charles 
James Fox, even when he had gambled away his 
last dollar, was beloved by the people because 
of his gracious manner. Gladstone was the idol 


143 


The Strenuous Career 


of the English race, despite political hatred, 
owing to the charm of his personality and win¬ 
ning ways, which also gained for him many a 
vote and won many an election. The genial, 
kindly, lovable life of William McKinley en¬ 
deared his name to the homes of the American 
people, and his untimely death plunged a na¬ 
tion into tears, regardless of all political affili¬ 
ation. 

The “I don’t know,” “I don’t care,” **None 
of my business” kind of man stays where he 
starts. More than their ability, their manners 
have put, most successful men where they are 
today. 

Show courtesy to others, not because they are 
gentlemen, but because you are one. 

Shabby clothes and rude manners are no lon¬ 
ger looked upon as the eccentricities of genius. 
If a genius who has firmly established himself 
prefers to go around shabby, remember that 
what will be charitably called eccentricity in 
him, will be regarded as a serious defect in you 
and will retard your progress. Emulate the 
genius if you will, but not in his bad manners. 

If you are a young man struggling for a ca¬ 
reer, it behooves you to call to your aid all the 
requisites to success that you can, and among 
these, one of the foremost, if not the first, is 
good manners. 


144 


CHAPTER XX. 


DRINK AND BUSINESS. 

The world of business has put a ban on the 
drinking man, it does not want him, has no use 
for him, and consequently slams its door in his 
face. 

A few years ago Carroll D. Wright, then 
United States Government Labor Commis¬ 
sioner, addressed inquiries to 6,673 manufac¬ 
turers all over the country. More than half 
of these, employing over a million men, replied 
and 75 per cent of them declared, that they made 
every endeavor to secure those not addicted to 
the use of intoxicating liquor in any form. This 
shows the stand this country is taking on the 
drink question. She knows the dangers of the 
drink evil to her future progress and she is tak¬ 
ing steps to safeguard herself. She is barring 
the gates of opportunity on drinking men and 
leaving them solitary outside the pale to go their 
own way to ruin. 

Every line of business is barring out the ine¬ 
briates and admitting only the steady and the 
sober who can be absolutely relied upon to dis- 


145 


The Strenuous Career 


charge their duties to the best of their ability. 
Even those engaged in the liquor traffic as a bus¬ 
iness will not have employes who drink, for they 
know that such kind of help can never make 
good, can never be as serviceable and efficient as 
those who wholly shun the sparkling cup and 
keep their heads clear for every emergency. 
Whiskey drummers are now sober men; they no 
longer sample their own wares when treating 
customers; if they drank they could do no busi¬ 
ness. Bar-tenders are sober men also, and for 
two reasons,—1st, they would lose their jobs if 
not sober; 2d, they daily, hourly see such fear¬ 
ful, terrible results of the drinking habit that 
their very souls revolt against it; all that is 
manly and honest in their natures cries out 
against it, and hence they shun it as a monster 
whose ravening jaws are open to devour them. 
Indeed all who have to depend on hand or brain 
for a livelihood are beginning to realize, to the 
full, that abstinence from liquor is utterly im¬ 
perative to any kind of success in the life race. 
Competition has become so keen in our day that 
only the very best have any show of winning, 
and certainly no man can put forward his best 
or be worthy of himself if he indulges to any 
extent, however slight, in liquor. It is now a 
question of the survival of the fittest all along 


146 





DRINK AND BUSINESS. 























I 





Drink and Busmess 


the line; the unfit go to the wall every time. 
Principle, character, honor, honesty, truth, 
grit and sobriety must now blend in a man if 
he wishes to forge ahead or even keep his place 
in the contest. Without them he must inevit¬ 
ably fall behind. 

One day the late H. B. Claflin, merchant 
prince, was sitting in his office when a pale, care¬ 
worn young man timidly knocked and entered. 
“Mr. Claflin,’’ said he, “I am in need of help; 
I am unable to meet certain claims because cer¬ 
tain parties have not done as they agreed to, 
and I would like to have $10,000; I came to you, 
because you were a friend to my father, and I 
thought you might be a friend to me.” 

“Iam glad to see you; sit down; have a glass 
of wine ? ’ ’ 

“No, I don’t drink.” 

“Have a cigar, then?” 

“No, I never smoke.” 

“Well,” said the joker, “I would like to ac¬ 
commodate you, but I don’t think I can.” 

“Very well,” returned the caller, “I thought 
perhaps you might. Good day, Sir.” 

“Hold on,” said Mr. Claflin, rising, “you 
don’t drink?” 

“No.” 

“Nor smoke?” 


149 


The Strenuous Career 


“No.” 

“Nor gamble?” 

“No.” 

“Nor anything of the kind?” 

“No.” 

“Yon shall have the money, my friend,” said 
Mr. Claflin, the tears coming into his eyes, 
“and three times the amount you ask. Your 
father let me have $5,000 once, and asked me 
the same questions; he trusted me, so now I will 
trust you. No, don’t thank me,—I owe you the 
obligement for your father’s trust.” 

This incident—the implicit trust the great 
merchant put in the young man on account of 
his answers to the questions asked—proves that 
good habits alone can gain confidence. Will any 
man of sense put trust in a drunkard? No, for 
drunkenness is not alone a disqualification for 
confidence in itself, but it is the parent of a nu¬ 
merous progeny of evils which, like a train of 
ghouls, ever follow in its footsteps, seeking to 
blight and blast with their upas breath every¬ 
thing that comes in their way. Every infringe¬ 
ment of the decalogue, every crime in the calen¬ 
dar can be traced to the door of drink. It has 
broken every commandment that God gave unto 
Moses for the observance of the Law. 

(1) It has dethroned God in His sanctuary 


150 


Drink and Business 


and set up its own bestial appetite as an apothe¬ 
osis in place of the Divine. 

(2) It has made itself a graven image of its 
own gluttony; it prostitutes itself down before 
it, and as the heathens offer gifts to their gods, 
so it offers the deadly cup of its own self-abase¬ 
ment and sin. 

(3) It has blasphemed God’s Holy Name and 
dedicated the tongue made for divine praise to 
the service of Satan and. the worship of hell. 

(4) The day consecrated to the Most High it 
has desecrated by every kind of orgy, and in¬ 
stead of a festival of praise and adoration has 
turned it into a saturnalia of gluttony and de¬ 
bauchery. 

(5) It has brought down the gray hairs of 
parents in shame to the grave and danced a 
devil’s hornpipe on the tombstones that should 
have been hallowed with filial love. 

(6) It has steeped its murderous hands in the • 
crimson blood of countless victims and shrieked 
in demoniacal delight at the drippings, though 
every drop was crying to heaven for venge¬ 
ance. 

(7) It has laughed at the sacredness and the 
sanctity of the Christian home, defiled it with 
leprous lust, trampled purity beneath its feet 
and clasped in its shaking arms the sickening 
incarnation of lewd and lecherous shame, 


151 


The Strenuous Career 


(8) It has sneered and snaffled in drivelling 
contempt at the rights of others and inflamed by 
its own guilt has stolen their substance to grat¬ 
ify its animal craving. 

(9) It has detracted, vilified, lied, calumniated 
its neighbors in maudlin madness; it has per¬ 
jured itself in a thousand ways and by every 
subterfuge and artifice has tried to cloak its 
shivering scandal and shut out the light of truth. 

(10) It has set its covetous blood-stained eyes 
on the goods of others, its cowardly heart ever 
craving for something more to gratify its in¬ 
satiable desires, and it has left the trail of im¬ 
purity, adultery and incest it is slimy wake. 
No sanctuary so sacred, no home so hallowed 
that it has not entered to desecrate and defile. 

God is forgotten, heaven rejected, virtue de¬ 
spised, the good abandoned,—all for sake of 
the grinning, ghastly, horrible, hideous demon 
of Rum who is ever beckoning the way to tem¬ 
poral and eternal ruin. 

The curse of drink has inundated thousands 
of homes in an ocean of tears, it has made more 
widows and orphans than all the wars of his¬ 
tory and sent more to premature graves than 
the cholera or Black Death. On the brow of 
youth it has stamped the blighting, blasting in¬ 
signia of senile decay, and, step by step, has led 
the way from the sunny heights of health down 


152 


Drink and Business 


to the dark cypress shadows of the tomb. It 
hurls manhood from its citadel and in its place 
sets up a weakened, weak, distorted, distracted, 
shapeless, soulless thing, a parody on humanity, 
a caricature on the handiwork of the Almighty, 
a blot to earth and a slur to heaven. 

Where Bacchus reigns, Dishonor is vice-re¬ 
gent, the kingdom is divided against itself and 
inevitably must fall. 

Bacchus has never been known to have a long 
reign. He ruled for a while among the ancient 
Romans, but the glory of his court soon became 
tarnished, the light became dim, and he was de¬ 
throned by an Era of Reason which, in just in¬ 
dignation, hurled to the dust the barbaric de¬ 
bauchery and heathen licentiousness that had 
mantled, in a cloak of shame, the proudest em¬ 
pire of history. 

Bacchus also sent the haughty Greeks down 
to ruin beneath the splendors of their own great¬ 
ness. He next turned his face towards the 
Western countries, and those who acknowledged 
his sway soon went the way of the rest. The 
dust of centuries lies thick on the tombs of the 
buried Past, but underneath can be deciphered 
many an inscription to tell of the wreck and 
ruin that characterized every reign of the jolly 
King Bacchus. A jolly king indeed he was and 


153 


The Strenuous Career 


is, but the laughter he calls forth ever ends in 
tears; the mirth he provokes has its climax in 
sighs; the joy he sends round is followed by sor¬ 
row and the rejoicing he commands is soon 
overtaken by mourning. Many enthrone him 
in their homes, but the sceptre is soon wrenched 
from his grasp by Poverty and a battle-royal 
takes place between them for supremacy. 

The youth would do well not to acknowledge 
him their sovereign; if he dare to usurp the 
throne, let them rise in might and scorn and 
drive him from their domain. Youth too is a 
god in itself, a grand, bright, beautiful, graceful 
god, then why should this god of its own not 
rule, rule from the throne of a bright intellect, 
with strong arms and sturdy limbs, buoyant step 
and flashing eye that is able to look the whole- 
world in the face without the tremor of fear. 
Put the god of your own peerless young man¬ 
hood on the throne and let it rule you wisely and 
well. 


154 


CHAPTER XXI. 

PROMPTNESS AND SUCCESS. 

The greatest and best mark of modern prog¬ 
ress is a thorough realization of the immeas¬ 
urable and priceless value of time; civilization 
has made its chiefest gain in correctly measur¬ 
ing and utilizing to the best advantage the one 
gift which man must use either wisely, to his 
own good, or foolishly, to his own evil. For cen¬ 
turies the world wasted time as if it were of no 
value, let it slip through its fingers as sand, 
never thinking that each grain was a golden 
gem to bedeck the everlasting crown of eternity. 
Those gems can never he recovered, they are 
buried deep in the oblivion of the past and it is 
for no man to exhume them; he can only draw 
experience from their loss and so learn to make 
use of the treasure that is his in the present in 
order to conserve the future. 

Time will wait for no man, yet many seem to 
be under the impression, that instead of having 
wings to its shoulders it has weights to its feet, 
which will hold it to wait on their convenience 
until they get good and ready to meet it. Such 


155 


The Strenuous Career 


people generally wake up from their trance to 
find that their opportunities have passed like 
lightning flashes never to return, and then they 
can only lament their own stupidity. 

Delay can never take advantage of anything, 
for it allows everything to pass by its door and 
then only takes up the pursuit when it is too late 
and unavailing. Delay in our day is an unpar¬ 
donable sin and even in the days of the stage¬ 
coach unnecessary delay amounted to a crime. 
It has wrought untold and incalculable mischief 
from the earliest tunes. 

Caesar’s delay to read a message cost him his 
life when he reached the Senate House. Colonel 
Rahl, the Hessian commander, was too busy at 
the card-table to attend to a messenger bearing 
a letter which stated that Washington was 
crossing the Delaware. He delayed to read that 
letter until the game was finished, and then he 
had only time to rally his men in a forlorn hope 
and rush to the scene of activities, but alas! the 
enemy had the vantage point, and the gallant 
Colonel fell at the head of his company, while 
the men who had followed his lead were taken 
prisoners, whereas, had he been prompt at 
duty’s call, the tables might have been turned, 
at least, that day, and instead of being the van¬ 
quished he might have been the victor. How 


156 


Promptness and Success 

often on a few minntes depend liberty, honor 
and life itself! 

Napoleon laid great stress on the “supreme 
moment,’’ and became an adept in taking ad¬ 
vantage of that “nick of time” which comes in 
every battle, the crucial moment on which often 
depends the destiny of nations. He said he 
beat the Austrians because they did not know 
the value of five minutes. It has been said that 
among the concatenation of circumstances that 
conspired to defeat the hitherto invincible Cor¬ 
sican at Waterloo was the loss of a few minutes 
by himself with Grouchy’s delay to join him, 
though but a few miles distant. All day long 
the fierce struggle waged with terrible inten¬ 
sity, but no decisiveness on either side. The 
shades of evening were falling and the allied 
forces under Wellington were almost worn out 
by wounds and losst of numbers. ’Tis said that 
the little Irishman was almost in despair and 
murmured,—-“Oh, for night or Blucher!” At 
that moment Blucher with his Prussian contin¬ 
gent came dashing up and the re-inforcement of 
the allies decided the issue. Grouchy on whom 
Napoleon was depending failed to come. His 
delay was fatal to the “Little Corporal,”—it 
sent him to exile and to death on St. Helena. 

Kemember that the present is the time to act, 


157 


The Strenuous Career 


don’t wait on the future; the present is yours, 
hut the future is not; it may never knock at 
your door. What may he done at any time will 
he done at no time. If a thing is worth doing, 
don’t stand shivering on the brink, hut jump in 
and do it. It won’t do to be perpetually calcu¬ 
lating risks and adjusting nice chances. The 
man who waits, doubts and hesitates and con¬ 
sults his neighbors and relations as to whether 
he should do this or whether he should do that, 
will find himself gray-haired before he attempts 
to do anything and then he will discover that he 
has no time to follow anybody’s advice or the 
strength to take any action. 

The time wasted in delaying and postponing 
and procrastinating and putting-off, if rightly 
utilized, would be sufficient to accomplish the 
most important of tasks, which, when thus shun¬ 
ned for the present because of some little un¬ 
pleasantness or difficulty, are liable never to 
be performed. The evening wasted in setting 
aside, for tomorrow, the duties which could be 
performed today, would often be more than 
enough to accomplish all that has to be done. 
Besides, delays really make work drudgery. 
You have to make up for lost time and therefore 
the tasks are doubly difficult, and moreover, lia¬ 
ble to be slouched over in a poor, unworkman- 


158 


Promptness and Success 

like manner which never gives satisfaction to 
either the performer or those for whom the work 
is done. Work is easy to those who do it when 
it should be done, hut to those who defer it, the 
task becomes monotonous, dull and difficult and 
develops into downright drudgery. The latter 
can never overtake their work, and instead of 
getting less, it daily accumulates and a clean, 
clear, complete job becomes almost an impossi¬ 
bility to accomplish. 

If you lose an hour in the morning you will 
be all day hunting for it and at night find that 
you have not recovered it. That hour is irre¬ 
trievably lost and there is no use advertising for 
it, since your neighbor could not find it for you; 
it is irrevocably lost in the ocean of eternity 
and what a beautiful gem it was!—a golden 
jewel set round with sixty diamond minutes 
and each one of these encrusted with sixty 
sapphire seconds,—gone never to be found. How 
much poorer you are for losing that one golden 
jewelled hour! The whole future of your life, 
—misery or happiness, woe or joy, disease or 
health, even salvation itself may depend on one 
hour, nay one minute rightfully used. What 
would not the dying sinner give for time to cor¬ 
rect the errors of his life and do what was 
right and just! And remember the recording 


159 


The Strenuous Career 


angel sets down on your debit side every second 
wrongfully misused, for time is the choicest 
blessing of heaven, and— 


If idly lost no art or care 
That blessing can restore, 

And Heaven exacts a strict account 
For every mis-spent hour. 

* * * # 

Short is our longest day of life, 

And soon its prospects end, 

Yet on that day’s uncertain date 
Eternal years depend. 

Time is the warp of life; tis for all, especially 
the young, to weave it well, into a bright and 
beautiful garment that shall cover them as with 
a shining robe during the days of earthly travail 
and in which they can pass across the bridge 
that leads from the darkness of the temporal to 
the light of the eternal. Don’t let the strands 
of the warp drop; be prompt with the shut¬ 
tle. Promptness takes away the monotony and 
the drudgery, smoothes out the creases and 
makes every surface soft and velvety. Delays 
toughen and harden and throw the whole thing 
into confusion. If a planet delayed a moment 
in its course it would throw the whole universe 
into chaos. Work can become one grand, sweet 
harmony, a symphony of pleasure, not of pain, 
if approached in the right way and the golden 


360 


Promptness and Success 


rule observed, of a time and place for every¬ 
thing and everything in its proper time and 
place. 

Sir Walter Raleigh was asked ,—* 1 How do you 
accomplish so much in so short a timer’ ‘ i When 
I have anything to do,” he replied, “I go and 
do it. ’ ’ The man who acts promptly may make 
mistakes, but he will succeed where a procras¬ 
tinator with better judgment will fail. 

“Tomorrow” is a word which is found only 
in the fool’s calendar and stands for nothing 
that is real and tangible; just the baseless stuff 
of which dreams are made, a fantastic vision of 
anticipations in the shadow-land of the future. 
Put no trust in tomorrow, it may be a bankrupt 
investment. Today is the best bank. Strike the 
iron while it is hot, for it soon cools. Make hay 
while the sun shines, for the clouds will soon 
shut out his light. 

And while you work have a system of work. 
Make a golden rule for yourself. Commence 
the day well. The morning hour is the test of 
the day’s success. Daniel Webster used often 
to answer thirty letters before breakfast. Co¬ 
lumbus planned his voyage in the early morn¬ 
ing. Napoleon made use of the early part of 
the day in all his successful campaigns. Bryant 
rose at five o’clock every morning and began 
work. Bancroft was up at the dawn and busy. 


161 


The Strenuous Career 


Washington, Jefferson, Clay,—all were early 
risers. Take example by them. The time to 
turn out is when you turn over. Walter Scott 
used to say, that by breakfast time, he had bro¬ 
ken the neck of the day’s work. Goethe, Schil¬ 
ler and Heine,—all found inspiration in the 
early morning air. 

Keep your appointments. Remember time is 
money. Don’t waste your own or that of others. 
When you have your business done, go about 
your business, and do not waste the time of a 
business man, for his time means money to him, 
and your time should mean something to you. 
Punctuality is the soul of business. There are 
moments on which hang the destiny of years. 
Promptness is the mother of confidence. Wear 
old clothes, if you must, but own a reliable 
watch. The employe who is always on time and 
there, when he is wanted, is sure to be appre¬ 
ciated and advanced before those who are 
careless of their own time and regardless of that 
of their masters. Much may depend on your 
promptness and punctuality. Many a wasted 
life dates its ruin from the loss of a few minutes 
at some vital stage. “Too late!” alas! tells the 
secret of many failures. A few minutes make 
all the difference. 

Be up, be doing, be prompt, be punctual, he 
on time . 


162 


CHAPTER XXII. 


THE PROGRESSIVE MAN. 

A number of men going to a funeral, observed 
that their horses were flying through an open 
field. In answer to the inquiry,—“Are your 
horses running away?” the driver said,—“No, 
not these horses, but the horses in the hearse 
are running away and we always follow the 
hearse.” 

There are people like that—they follow the 
crowd. Their creed is: “As it was in the be¬ 
ginning, is now, and ever shall be, world with¬ 
out end, Amen.” They never take any initia¬ 
tive or strike out new paths for themselves. 

Advance with the advancement of the times. 
Advance in the front ranks. Be open to new 
ideas. Be enterprising. Let the next thing be 
something else. If you are original and enter¬ 
prising you will be opposed, but opposition will 
prevent dullness. Criticism is the whetstone on 
which a highly-tempered nature is polished and 
refined. 

Every new idea in every age has been laughed 
at and met with the startling cry—Danger! 


163 


The Strenuous Career 


A thousand years ago in England the inventor 
of the umbrella was stigmatised an infidel for 
interfering with the design of Providence in 
regard to rainy weather. When showers fell 
the good people of that time believed it was evi¬ 
dent that God intended they should get wet, 
therefore, the man who meddled with what they 
thought was God’s design was anathematized. 
In the same way a self-constituted censorship 
of godliness and conservatism proclaimed as an 
outlaw, an abrogator of divine prerogatives, the 
man who gave to the world the great blessing of 
anaesthetics. It was claimed that if a limb ne¬ 
cessitated amputation, Providence designed that 
the patient should suffer pain, and therefore, 
to nullify such pain was to oppose Eternal Wis¬ 
dom. Small-pox was robbed of its terrors by 
the discovery of Jenner, yet the English of that 
period looked upon vaccination as the work of 
the devil, because God had made the disease 
contagious, and it was not for man to interfere 
with God’s ways. 

One hundred years ago last August 17, Rob¬ 
ert Fulton launched the first steamboat, the 
“Clermont” on the Hudson. Thousands of 
people lined the shores to witness what they 
considered his folly, but although he succeeded 
in making only five miles an hour, he had tri- 


164 


The Progressive Man 


umpired—lie had made steam propel a boat. Ful¬ 
ton opened the way for steam navigation, which 
advanced more and more, until today the pad¬ 
dles of a thousand steamboats churn the waters 
of the Hudson and the million dollar palace 
called the “Hendrick Hudson” majestically 
sweeps up the noble river carrying five thousand 
passengers. Fulton is now honored, the world 
over, and statues are erected to him every¬ 
where. 

It is also a hundred years since Oliver Evans, 
the inventor, predicated that the time would 
soon come when the high pressure locomotive 
would enable people who had breakfasted in 
Washington to take supper in New York, over 
two hundred miles distant. Nearly everybody 
regarded such prediction as evidence of an in¬ 
tellectual break-down, and felt sorry for the 
weakening of such a brilliant mind as was his, 
but Evans ’ brain was sound as ever. He knew 
what he was talking about. He foresaw the 
mighty possibilities of steam, and his words 
have been more than realized, his prophecy more 
than fulfilled. 

George Stephenson, father of the railway sys¬ 
tem, was badgered before a Committee of the 
House of Commons in 1825. The wise-acres of 
course saw perspective dangers in his schemes. 


165 


The Strenuous Career 


The great engineer was subjected to a rigid 
cross-examination, and madness was even 
hinted. He was asked: “Suppose an engine 
going along a railway at the rate of nine or ten 
miles an hour, and suppose a cow should get on 
the line in the way of the engine, would not that, 
think you, be a very awkward circumstance V ’ 
“Yes,” replied the engineer, “very awkward— 
for the cow.” 

The Quarterly Review of Stephenson’s day, 
a periodical supposed to reflect the views of 
scholars and thinking men, observed,—“What 
can be more palpably absurd than the prospect 
held out of a locomotive traveling twice as fast 
as stage coaches!” And Ashley Cooper, an 
eminent surgeon of the time, declared, “it was 
preposterous in the extreme,” that is, to hold 
out the prospect that a locomotive could travel 
twice as fast as a stage coach. Today a loco¬ 
motive travels more than ten times as fast. 

For thousands of years America lay with her 
brown face to the sun, with untold wealth 
clasped in her arms, till Christopher Columbus 
found her hiding place and introduced her to 
the rest of the world. Christopher Columbus 
was laughed at, but the laughing did not keep 
him back. When he put forward his theory that 
the earth was round and that he proposed to 


166 


The Progressive Man 


reach the East by sailing far enough to the 
West, he was regarded as a visionary and 
dreamer unworthy of consideration, and it was 
only through the influence and help of a few 
other “dreamers” who believed in him, that he 
was finally enabled to put theory into practice 
and discover a new world. ^ 

Copernicus was considered crazy when he 
said that the earth, as well as the other planets, 
moved around the sun, and his book on the revo¬ 
lution of the heavenly bodies was prohibited. 

Galileo was compelled to abjure his teachings 
in the belief of the Copernican system of as¬ 
tronomy, while mutterng under his breath,— 
“The earth moves all the same.” 

When Franklin drew electricity from the 
clouds with kites, people sneeringly asked,— 
“What use is it?” to which Franklin replied,— 
“What’s the use of a boy?—he may become a 
man.” 

Everybody thought that Graham Bell in 1876 
had taken leave of his senses when he proposed 
to make the human voice be heard over a wire. 
Now the telephone is indispensable to the busi¬ 
ness and commerce of the world. 

All these human giants have been self-asser¬ 
tive, self-reliant men, men who dared to be sin¬ 
gular, who did not mind the laughs and taunts 


167 


The Strenuous Career 


and jeers and jibes of the crowds, but held on to 
one idea, nurtured it, cared for it, cultivated it 
until, from it, they reaped success. 

Whenever any one has stepped out of the 
beaten path to make the world better and 
brighter and happier by some great invention, 
some useful discovery or by the proclamation of 
some mighty truth, the epithets—fanatic, vis¬ 
ionary, iconoclast,—have been hurled at his 
head, and too often he has been hounded down 
to the martyr’s grave. All! wherever those 
words have been raised against a man, there, 
we may be sure, a step has been taken in the 
emancipation of mankind from ignorance, from 
servitude, from his own debasement ; they have 
been hissed into the ears of Jenner and of Simp¬ 
son; they have been howled at Stephenson and 
Watt; they have been yelled in the presence of 
Fulton and Morse and they have been flung at 
Edison and Marconi. 

It is truly remarkable that, with a few nota¬ 
ble exceptions, the learned men of every age 
have been the most bitter antagonists of prog¬ 
ress, the worst obstructionists to advancement, 
the fiercest foes of new ideas. 

Indeed most of the great things that have been 
accomplished in the world for the elevation and 
the betterment of the race, have been accom- 


168 


The Progressive Man 


plished by men handicapped by the shackles of 
poverty, the gyves of oppression and the chains 
of suffering; contemned, scorned, mocked, ridi¬ 
culed, persecuted, yet rising above all to the very 
summits of success and fame, which proves 
that you cannot keep a good man down, no mat¬ 
ter in what circumstances he may be placed. 

From the ranks of the poor and lowly and the 
despised have come intellectual giants who by 
head and hand have enriched the world and at 
the same time have reflected everlasting lustre 
on themselves. 


169 


CHAPTER XXIII. 


HONESTY AND SUCCESS. 

Honesty is not only the first step towards 
greatness, it is greatness itself. When any one 
complains, as did Diogenes, that he has to 
search the streets at noon with a candle to find 
an honest man, we are apt to think that his near¬ 
est neighbor would have quite as much difficulty 
as himself in the quest. He who imagines there 
is no honest man in the world, save himself, is 
a suspicious character and will bear watching. 
There are many dubious people in the world 
who think that everybody is trying to get the 
better of them, and who will resort to any means, 
no matter how despisable and dishonest, to grat¬ 
ify their own advancement and accomplish their 
own ends. Such persons should be left out of 
account when judging human nature, as they do 
not at all represent it in the aggregate. They 
are pessimists who look on the dark side of ev¬ 
ery picture, never thinking that it has any other 
side; they are downright misanthropists,—hat¬ 
ers of their kind and, therefore, should be elim¬ 
inated in making a test of mankind under nor- 


170 


Honesty and Success 


mal conditions. When one loses faith in his 
own, he is in a pitiful condition,—it is the only 
rock to which he can cling amid the raging wa¬ 
ters of doubt that surrounds it, and when it fails 
he is swept into their embrace and is lost to all 
the good and cheer and brightness and hope 
which make life worth living. 

There is plenty of honesty in the world, and 
cases of dishonesty but serve to accentuate it 
and show it forth in a pleasing beauty to cap¬ 
tivate men, to make them appreciate and cling 
to it when they contrast it with the deformity 
of its antithesis. 

The truth of Cervante’s maxim, “Honesty is 
the best policy, ’’ is upheld by daily experience, 
but the motive for honesty should never spring 
from policy as its source,—honesty is not a 
policy, but a virtue,—it should always arise 
from an innate consciousness of moral recti¬ 
tude that prompts us to embrace the right and 
shun the wrong. If a man is a thief at heart, 
but is denied the opportunity to steal, he can¬ 
not be complimented much on his honesty. 
No man is honest but for right’s sake and be¬ 
cause he feels better for being so. But some 
make principle depend on policy and are only 
honest when the latter course is profitable; 
their consciences are very elastic and stretch 


171 


The Strenuous Career 


to a marvelous length to suit the desires, but 
when it comes to a question of being honest 
for honesty’s sake, they contract to almost the 
vanishing point; indeed in many cases con¬ 
science is cast out altogether and nothing re¬ 
mains but sordidness and greed and lust to 
get ahead by any means, no matter what, so 
long as it brings them power and affluence. 

Principle and policy cannot act together, 
when the one is present the other is absent. 
We must adopt the one and discard the other 
if we would lead really honest lives. Policy 
is only a mask for hypocrites who wish the 
world to believe them saints when they are the 
worst kind of sinners, pharisees who make 
ostentation of their honesty in the temples of 
business, but who are only honest because it 
pays not to be dishonest. Men of principle are 
actuated by a good conscience which seeks after 
the right for right’s sake; they are men who 
endeavor to the best of their ability to lead 
lives of honor that shall be useful to them¬ 
selves and beneficial to their kind. We have, 
happily, thousands of such men everywhere, 
but we need more, we need them everywhere, 
men who believe in the “square deal” and are 
willing to put up one hundred cents to the dol¬ 
lar every time. We want honest laborers who 


172 


Honesty and Success 


will give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s 
pay; we want honest artisans and mechanics 
and craftsmen who will bring skill to bear on 
their tasks and not be regardless of whether 
their work is slipshod and consequently a 
danger to life; we want honest merchants who 
will give thirty-six inches to the yard and thir¬ 
ty-two quarts to the bushel; we want honest gro¬ 
cers who will not mix the sugar with sand and 
the coffee with chicory; we want honest phy¬ 
sicians who will not pretend to cure ills of which 
they are ignorant; we want honest lawyers who 
will not make it safe for scoundrelly clients 
to defraud the public and who will not, for the 
sake of a fee, go into court with cases they know 
they will lose; we want honest preachers who 
will not hear a louder call with a big salary; we 
want honest farmers whose potatoes and ap¬ 
ples are sound all the way through; we want 
honest masters who will treat their servants 
like human beings with bodies to be cared for 
and souls to be saved and who will give them a 
decent wage for their service; we want honest 
servants who will not wantonly waste their 
masters’ substance because it is not their own, 
but who will be as careful of it as if it were— 
servants who will be economical and saving and 
do their best to conserve their employers ’ inter- 


173 


The Strenuous Career 


ests, since they are paid for doing so. In a word, 
we want men, everywhere, who will fulfill the di¬ 
vine command,—“Do unto other as you would 
that others should do unto you.’ ’ This is the very 
rock on which the structure of honesty is built. 
If every man would treat his fellow man as he 
would like to be treated himself, there would 
not be much cause for complaint, and this mil- 
lenium state might easily be brought around if 
men could but be impressed with the fact that 
all are brothers working for a common cause 
and that what is injurious to the individual will 
militate against all, just as what is salutary to 
one will also be healthful to the whole. The 
world wants men who will do what is right; 
men, who won’t do as everybody does, but as 
everybody ought to do; men who won’t run with 
the crowd, but who will step out and dare to be 
singular regardless of the ridicule or mockery 
or even the persecution of the mob; men who 
have the courage of their convictions and the 
manhood to defend what they conscientiously 
believe to be right and denounce that which they 
know to be wrong. 

There is a popular belief that success can be 
gained by so-called smartness, but such smart¬ 
ness generally consists in taking advantage of 
other people’s misfortune, inveigling the inno- 


174 



HONESTY AND SUCCESS. 

“AMERICA HAS TOO MANY SUCCESSFUL (?) MEN OF THIS STRIPE.” 








































































































































































































Honesty and Success 


cent and the unsuspecting into their net, and, in 
every way they can, endeavoring to get the best 
of everyone with whom they have dealings, 
gripping and gouging and grinding and mak¬ 
ing the aim and object of life the attainment of 
personal gain. Such people often do get along 
well from a worldly standpoint, hut are such 
lives really successful? 'Are these people 
happy, are they contented, with the maledic¬ 
tions of thousands of victims on their heads 
and spending most of their time trying to 
dodge the fiend of revenge, with the dagger of 
the assasin in the one hand and the dynamite 
bomb of the anarchist in the other? Should a 
man be called successful who laid the founda¬ 
tion for his structure of success on the weary, 
aching bones of the poor and oppressed; ce¬ 
mented it with the blood of the suffering 
masses, with the sweat of the widow and the 
tear of the orphan and on whose every stone 
is carved a curse? Surely such is not a man¬ 
sion of success but rather a monument to 
tyranny and persecution and wrong and the deg¬ 
radation of God’s poor. The nation has too 
many successful (?) men of this calibre,—in¬ 
stead of increasing, she should rather decrease 
their number. 

But, some may say,—Oh, ’tis all very well 
to talk about the beauty and nobleness and vir- 


177 


The Strenuous Career 


tue of honesty, but honesty very often fails to 
make the pot, boil brown; the honest men are 
at the foot of the ladder with every prospect of 
remaining there, while those who are less scru¬ 
pulous are stepping very lively to the top. In 
many instances this is the case, but it should be 
remembered that God does not reward honesty 
with this world’s coin, but instead, He recom¬ 
penses it with a clear conscience and a con¬ 
tented mind. If one man purchases success 
with deception, tyrannical treatment of work¬ 
men and workwomen, cutting down wages to 
the starvation point, selling inferior articles 
by all sorts of underhand tricks, what right 
have you to complain if you will not pay the 
same price, purchase it at the expense of your 
clear conscience and good name? If you sow a 
dishonest man’s seed, you will reap a dishonest 
man’s harvest, and the converse holds good. 

Strict honesty is the crown of one’s early 
days. Of course merely negative virtues are 
valueless. You are not going to be advanced be¬ 
cause you never robbed your employer, but on 
account of your energy, vigilance, ability and 
intelligence. 

Honest money-getting is a timely topic in our 
modern world, where fortunes are often made 
not by right, but by might. 


178 


Honesty and Success 


Be scrupulous in little tilings. It may be a 
small matter for a clerk to use bis employer’s 
postage stamps for bis personal correspond¬ 
ence, the amount involved is trivial, but the 
principle is all-important. 

Choose honesty as a soul companion. Em¬ 
body it in your actions and life, let nothing 
bribe you to leave it; make it your first love; 
be wedded to it from choice; it will make you 
beautiful men, noble men, and, in the best sense, 
truly successful men. 

Crown the peerless queen of principle with 
the golden diadem of honesty. 


179 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

ACCURACY AND SUCCESS. 

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty and 
they make such a good working team, pull so 
well together, that they are able to accomplish 
much work and do it well. The eye that winces 
at the false and is always on the look-out for the 
true' will eventually bring success within its 
vision. 

What is worth doing is worth doing well. 
Don’t do things by half; the half is never equal 
to the whole. As the old song has it:— 


“If I were a cobbler, it would be my pride, 
The best of all cobblers to be— 

If I were a tinker, no tinker beside 
Should mend an old kettle like me . 1 } 


If you can turn out the best work, even if, as 
Emerson says, it is only in the construction of 
a mouse-trap, the world will make a beaten path 
to your door, for they will prefer your mouse¬ 
trap, because it is better than the one manu¬ 
factured by your neighbor. The tailor who can 
cut a pair of pants and sew them together bet- 


180 


Accuracy and Success 


ter than his fellow-craftsmen of the shears and 
needle will never lack custom. 

The Persian proverb has it that “ doing well 
depends upon doing completely” and this is 
quite true. Except a job is done completely it 
can never be said to be done well. 

The world’s famous manufacturers have built 
their success on the reputation of their goods. 
The advertising helps merely to call attention to 
them, it is the quality that sells them. The suc¬ 
cessful man weaves his own character into the 
stuff he puts on the market and the public soon 
come to recognize his trade-mark as the stand¬ 
ard of merit and will have no other brand but 
his in the same line. Why do people constantly 
order certain makes and insist upon getting 
them? Because they have by experience come 
to regard such makes as “the old reliable,” and 
they are willing to pay a little more, not for the 
name, as many say, but for the value they know 
they will receive,—the name is simply the 
synonym for honesty of quality. There is no se¬ 
cret in the success of great manufacturers; their 
success is simply the sequent of ‘ ‘ square 9 9 deal¬ 
ing. They try always to do their best, their 
motto is, not how cheap they can make their 
goods, but how well. Every day they try to im¬ 
prove on their former productions, therefore, 


181 


The Strenuous Career 


they keep up the reputation of their wares and 
gain the confidence of the people. 

It always pays to put character in your work, 
no matter what that work may he. Never be 
satisfied with doing good work, always bend ev¬ 
ery energy to turn out the best work, to be 
ahead of your competitors every time. No mat¬ 
ter how humble the task assigned you, do it to 
the best of your ability, and never fear but rec¬ 
ognition will come your way. Many poor boys 
have become the world’s greatest men. Why? 
Because they did their best. Let your motto 
ever be “Excelsior,” higher and higher, better 
and better. 

There are many ways of lying, and one is by 
doing slip-shod work. There is no inaccuracy 
in nature,—a rose in the grounds of the White 
House is not more beautiful than one which can 
be made to bloom in the backyard of a tene¬ 
ment,—nature is the uniform manifestation of 
the will of God. 

Andrew Johnson in a speech told the story of 
how he began his political career,—from an al¬ 
derman up, when a man in the crowd shouted,— 
‘ 1 from a tailor up. ’’ The President answered,— 
11 that does not disconcert me in the least; when 
I was a tailor, I had the reputation of being a 
good one and working close fits; I was always 


182 


Accuracy and Success 

punctual with my customers and did good 
work. ’’ 

Do your work with your best care and faith¬ 
fulness of purpose. It was said of Rufus 
Choate, that he would plead before a country 
squire in a petty case with all the fervor and 
careful attention to detail with which he ad¬ 
dressed the United States Supreme Court, 

The only real failure in life possible is not to 
be true to the best that you know. “Easy 
writing,” said Sherman, “is commonly hard 
reading. ’ ’ 

One merchant telegraphed to another,—“Am 
offered ten thousand bushels of wheat at $1; 
shall I buy or is it too high?” “No price too 
high,” came back over the wire, instead of “No, 
price too high.’ ’ The omission of a punctuation 
mark cost $2,000. Carelessness will ruin any 
business, for more will go to waste than will be 
counter-balanced by the profits, and finally the 
crash will come; but strict attention to every de¬ 
tail will keep the bolts of all parts of the ma¬ 
chinery in their right place and so make the 
w r heels revolve without danger of a break-down. 

The accurate man wins out every time. Em¬ 
ployers don’t want to be constantly watching 
their men; they want men on whom they can de¬ 
pend, both when they themselves are present 


183 


The Strenuous Career 


and when they are absent. They don’t want to 
stand at the elbows of their book-keepers all day 
to inspect the figures and be sure of their accu¬ 
racy,—they might as well keep the books them¬ 
selves. 

The accurate accountant is always sure of em¬ 
ployment, while the one who makes mistakes is 
constantly looking for a job. A wrong figure 
may cause incalculable labor in a store, a fac¬ 
tory or a bank and lose much valuable time to 
discover the error. 

The employe should remember that he is paid 
for doing his work well, and that he is robbing 
his employer if he does not,—stealing both his 
time and his money. 

A good inscription on the tombstone of Fail¬ 
ure are the words,—“Carelessness, Indiffer¬ 
ence and Slip-shod Work.” Permit no irregu¬ 
larity in your work; allow no one to do it better. 

Wendell Phillips became America’s greatest 
orator, because to natural ablity he added am¬ 
bition for perfection, every word had to be 
shaped to express his exact thought, every 
phrase had to be of one length and cadence and 
every sentence had to be perfectly balanced be¬ 
fore it left his lips. As a result exact precision 
characterized his style. Roger Williams was as 
good a shoemaker as he was afterwards a great 


184 


'Accuracy and Success 


statesman. Franklin’s thoroughness left its 
impression upon the whole printing trade and is 
felt to this day. 

Many an author has devoted much time and 
attention and care to his MS. only to have it 
rejected on account of had penmanship. Macau¬ 
lay, who wrote his best essays three times, said: 
“The world generally gives its admiration, not 
to the man who does what nobody else ever at¬ 
tempts to do, but to the man who does best what 
the multitudes do well.” 


185 


CHAPTER XXV. 

FAITHFULNESS AND SUCCESS. 

Aim at perfection in everything yon do, for 
though in many cases such may he unattainable, 
nevertheless, the effort will bring you nearer 
the goal of desire. ’Tis despondency that begets 
laziness and both combined make men give up 
their ambitions and lie down, when by grit and 
determination, the will to accomplish, the aim to 
do, they might have carved their way to the top¬ 
most height of success. 

Everyday experience proves the Bible saying, 
that the man who is faithful in a few things 
becomes lord of many. We often hear men say 
when they complete a job, or rather leave it in¬ 
complete,—^ Oh, that will do, its good enough, 
nobody will know the difference.’* This is fal¬ 
lacious reasoning. As long as the workmen 
know the difference, and that ought to be 
enough, there is always somebody who knows 
and soon everybody will know, and that job will 
reflect discredit on those who performed it and 
who foolishly imagined the public would be de¬ 
ceived. It is not so easy to deceive the public 


186 


Faithfulness and Success 


as many seem to think; some one is sure to find 
out the deception. To slop over a job is equiva¬ 
lent to stealing the money of those who employ 
you to do it. Can any man have self-respect 
who knows he is taking the money to which he is 
not entitled, the money he has not honestly 
earned? Such a man is a traitor to his own 
conscience, a renegade to his best instincts, and 
when a man cannot respect himself, he knows 
that the respect of his fellow-men is lost to him. 
He who will not do honest work for his money, 
will soon learn to be dishonest in everything 
else, he is on a downward grade that will lead 
him to the gates of crime and shame. 

When a man puts into his work the best that 
is in him, he has the satisfaction of an easy 
conscience, the money he has earned does not 
burn his pockets, and no accusing voice is whis¬ 
pering in his ear, that he has wronged his 
brother. Like Longfellow’s “Village Black¬ 
smith” he can look the whole world in the face 
and fear not any man. How unlike the man who 
shrinks his responsibility, whose only aim in 
his work is to get the money, regardless of how 
the job is done, whose only thought is how he 
can get the best of others! Such a man knows 
he is a thief in his heart, for dishonesty in work 
is as much stealing as extracting money out of 


187 


The Strenuous Career 


a cash-drawer, and so he cannot help despising 
himself, yet he is cunning, crafty, ever on the 
alert, watching others with a cat-like suspicion, 
for he cannot help thinking that the eyes of all 
are upon him, and that every glance is a denun¬ 
ciation of his meanness. 

A mechanic who did some work in my home 
under contract with the builder did a very poor 
job, a dishonest piece of work, and when I called 
his attention to the fact, he reminded me that 
the contractor who built the house got the kind 
of work for which he paid, yet I know that the 
slip-shod job has cost the man thousands of dol¬ 
lars in being deprived of other commissions in 
the neighborhood. His object was not a finished 
job, but merely to get through with the business 
as soon as possible and get the money that was 
in it. By doing as little as he could to get 
through, he not only “did” the contractor and 
the man who bought the house, but worse, he 
“did” himself, for he lost respect, confidence 
and trade. He received pay for a good job, he 
knowingly did a bad one, and so he is as much 
a thief as if he had taken money out of my 
pocketbook. But this truth does not appear to 
strike home in most cases. 

Faithlessness, carelessness and disregard for 
the rights of others grow out of the failure to 


188 


Faithfulness and Success 

recognize not only the law of brotherhood, hut 
failure to understand clearly that the man who 
does not do his duty really hurts himself and 
shadows his own soul in a way for which no 
money can compensate. 

Doing things better, no matter how trivial 
the things may be, commands success. Roths¬ 
child’s maxim,—“Do without fail that which 
you determine to do,” brought him to the top¬ 
most rung of the ladder of success, and it 
will also give you the careful foot-planting, 
steady-eyeing and deep-breathing necessary to 
scale ‘ ‘ The Hill of Difficulty, ’ 9 which every suc¬ 
cessful man must climb. 

Be thorough. When you put your hand to the 
plough, be sure to make a straight furrow. 
An old sculptor said of his carvings, when com¬ 
ment was made on his perfectly finished work, 
perfect in the minutest detail,—“The gods 
will see.” If your work is not as it should be, 
you may be sure somebody will find the defects 
and expose you. You can never pass shoddy for 
silk. 

Employers very often make the complaint, 
that they have much difficulty in finding faithful, 
honest help; they say that the majority need to 
be watched and that they are more inerested in 
a prospect of an increase of salary than in their 


389 


The Strenuous Career 


duties. This shows the trend of the times and is 
responsible for the great army of the unem¬ 
ployed who are continually walking our streets. 
There is no lack of work, but there is a lack 
of honest men to do the work faithfully and 
well. 

In our great establishments there are today 
fewer men reaching high places than formerly, 
and this is not either for want of ability or for 
opportunity, it arises simply from the fact that 
fewer will conscientiously preserve and keep 
their masters’, as well as their own, interests at 
heart. The man who does not care whether the 
business is winning or losing as long as he gets 
his pay envelope on Saturday is not very worthy 
of promotion. 

Young men today have not the stability of 
character, nor the downright, clean and thor¬ 
ough honesty of purpose which distinguished 
their fathers and enabled them to lay strong 
foundations for the commercial and business 
life of the nation, and a great laxity is also per¬ 
ceptible in the trades and crafts. Bush and 
bustle and haste and hurry have much to do with 
the inefficiency of modern workers. It is some¬ 
times better to go slow. Foreign mechanics of¬ 
ten have the call over Americans, inasmuch as 
they are more skilled, because they have to serve 


190 


Faithfulness and Success 


longer apprenticeships to their trades. Here, 
our young men have not only an apathy to¬ 
wards skilled labor, hut, when they do learn dif¬ 
ferent branches of handicraft, there is such little 
time given to the acquisition, that it cannot he 
expected they will he proficient or thorough in 
their line. In England most of the crafts call 
for a five years’ apprenticeship, many of them 
seven and even more, and in Germany the time 
demanded is still longer, so that even in Eng¬ 
land, German mechanics and clerks are pre¬ 
ferred to native. English bookkeepers are gen¬ 
erally masters of shorthand and German ac¬ 
countants are familiar with different systems in 
different languages, but here the young men 
step into positions unprepared and they growl 
when a foreigner, because of his ability is ad¬ 
vanced over them. 

Again, our young men are very fond of watch¬ 
ing the clock; the hands don’t move fast enough 
for them, and as soon as the figure 12 is indi¬ 
cated they rush off to luncheon, only to return 
and wait impatiently for 5 or 6, when on the 
stroke, they have their hats in their hands ready 
to dash away to useless amusements and often 
sinful pleasures. With the foreigner, it is gen¬ 
erally different,—the clock dial does not inter¬ 
est him and he is in no hurry to leave. The 


191 


The \Strenuous Career 


masters note this and act accordingly. Is it 
any wonder, then, that foreigners forge ahead 
in this country and ere we realize it are at the 
top conducting great enterprises of their own? 

There is no country in the world where there 
is so much poor work done as in America; 
things are actually thrown together, made up to 
sell, to take the eye, utterly regardless of quality 
and endurance, so that often European goods 
are cheaper at double the price. Much better for 
us to go slower and he more thorough. Indeed 
there is nothing we need to learn more than 
thoroughness. 


192 



BACKBONE. 

I'LL FIGHT IT OUT ON THIS LINE IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER_ Grant . 


























CHAPTER XXVI. 

BACKBONE. 

Charles Sumner said,—“There are three 
things necessary: 1. Backbone. 2. Backbone. 
3. Backbone.” 

When Lincoln was asked how Grant im¬ 
pressed him as a general, he replied,—“The 
greatest thing about him is his cool persistence 
of purpose; he has the grip of a bulldog; when 
once he gets his teeth in nothing can shake 
him.” 

This was the whole compendium of Grant’s 
character, his epitome as a soldier. Nothing 
could shake him off. With him it was,—“On 
to Richmond,” and “I shall fight it out on this 
line if it takes all summer,” that broke the back¬ 
bone of the Rebellion and eventually made Lee 
surrender. This wonderful man, at thirty- 
eight an obscure citizen of Galena, drawing but 
$800 a year in his father ’s tannery, at forty-two 
was one of the greatest generals of history. 
After his defeat at Shiloh nearly every news¬ 
paper of both parties in the North, almost every 


193 


The Strenuous Career 

member of Congress, and public sentiment all 
over the country clamored for his removal. 
Friends of Lincoln plead with him, as President, 
to give the command to someone else, not alone 
for the good of the country, but for the sake of 
his own reputation. The President listened for 
hours one night until the clock struck one. Then, 
after a long silence, he said,—“I can’t spare this 
man,—he fights.” It was Lincoln’s insight and 
determination that saved Grant from the storm 
of popular passion and so gave us the greatest 
hero of the Civil War. 

When Phil Sheridan found his army retiring 
before the victorious Early, the general in com¬ 
mand said,—“Oh, sir, we are beaten.” “No, 
sir,” said Sheridan, “you are beaten, but not 
this army.” Then seizing his army, as Jupiter 
his thunderbolt, he hurled it upon the enemy, 
and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. 

Do you know how General Thomas Jonathan 
Jackson received the sobriquet “Stonewall” 
which never left him? The troops of South 
Carolina, commanded by General Bell, had been 
overwhelmed at the battle of Manassas, and he 
rode up to Jackson in despair, exclaiming: 
“They are beating us back.” “Then,” said 
Jackson, “we will give them the bayonet.” Bell 
rode oft to rejoin his command, and cried out to 


194 


Backbone 


them to look at Jackson, saying,—“There he 
stands like a stonewall; rally behind the Vir¬ 
ginians !’ 9 

“It is in me and shall come out,” said Bichard 
Brinsley Sheridan, when told that he would 
never make an orator, as he had failed in his 
first speech in Parliament; he became one of the 
foremost orators of his day. 

Behold William Lloyd Garrison, a broadcloth 
mob is leading him through the streets of Bos¬ 
ton by a rope; he is hurried to jail. He returns 
unflinchingly to his work, beginning at the point 
at which he was interrupted. Note this heading 
in the Liberator : “I am in earnest. I will not 
equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retract 
a single inch, and I will be heard.” That one 
man of grit became God’s redhot thunderbolt 
that shivered that colossal iniquity—slavery. 
Even the gallows erected in front of his doors 
did not daunt him. His grit made an unwilling 
world hear the word, “Freedom,” which was 
destined never to cease its vibrations until it 
had breathed its sweet secret to the last slave. 

Clear grit always commands respect ; it is the 
quality which achieves something, and every¬ 
body admires achievement. 

Backbone, even without brains, will carry 
against brains without backbone. Seeming im- 


195 


The Strenuous Career 


possibilities surrender to invincible purpose and 
imperial energy. Kdtto, the master of Oriental 
learning, lost bis hearing at twelve and his fath¬ 
er’s circumstances became so wretched that 
young Kitto was sent to the poorhouse where 
he learned shoemaking. He piteously begged his 
father to take him out of the poorhouse, saying 
that he would live upon blackberries and field- 
turnips and be willing to sleep on a hay-rick. 
What obstacles could dampen the enthusiasm of 
such ardor! What impossibilities could with¬ 
stand such a resolute will! 

Patrick Henry had clear grit, when in the 
Virginia House of Burgesses amid cries of 
“Treason,” he stood up and said,—“Is life so 
dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at 
the price of chains and slavery? I know not 
what course others may take, but as for me, 
give me liberty or give me death! ’ ’ 

Grit is that very element of character which 
in itself has the power to control and command; 
it pilots the ship through sunshine and storm, 
through sleet and rain, even when there is a 
leak and the crew in mutiny, and never gives 
up the helm until it steers into the harbor of 
success. It will bring a man through when every 
other quality will fail him. 

Henry M. Stanley, speaking of his success in 


196 


Backbone 


Africa against tremendous odds, says,—“No 
matter how near death I might be, even if I 
were in the hands of the executioner and sur¬ 
rounded by guards, I should never yield with¬ 
out one last desperate struggle. I should he 
overpowered, hut what of that? I had died 
fighting.” 

When General Gordon saw a soldier at Appo- 
matox running away from the battle at the top 
of his speed, he stopped him and demanded: 
1 ‘ What are you running away for ? ” “ Because 
I can’t fly,” and on he went. How many run 
away from battle and victory just that way! 

Irresistible determination, looking for future 
triumph through present trial has always be¬ 
gotten confidence and commanded success. 
Caesar would not have crossed the Rubicon, nor 
Washington the Delaware, had they not fixed 
their stern gaze on objects far beyond the perils 
at their feet. 

Most of the failures in life are due to want of 
grit or nerve. A yielding disposition, or, in other 
words, no backbone to map out a course and 
pursue it steadily, unswervingly to the end, 
leaves many a one behind in the life-race. You 
know how the boy said he learned to skate,— 
by getting up every time he fell down and try¬ 
ing again. Men who have been successful have 


197 


The Strenuous Career 


often been defeated, but they turned each de¬ 
feat into a stepping-stone to further progress. 

“If you happen to fall just pick yourself up 
As well and as quick as you can— 

Start the race in the fresh till the goal you have won, 

And show to the world you ’re a man . 1 * 

Edmund Burke said,—-“Never despair, but if 
you do, work on in despair.” Every successful 
man is the story of an iron will and invincible 
determination. Franklin dined on a small loaf 
in a printing office, with a book in his hand. 
Locke lived on bread and water in a Dutch gar¬ 
ret. It was this same indomitable spirit that 
sustained Lincoln and Garfield on their hard 
journey from the log-cabin and the tow-path 
to the splendors of the White House. 

Prescott was blind, but he put grit in place 
of eyesight into his work and became one of our 
greatest historians. 

In our own time a remarkable instance of 
what grit can do, even when handicapped by 
seemingly insurmountable obstacles, is pre¬ 
sented in the case of the deaf, dumb and blind 
girl, Helen Keller. Miss Keller has conquered 
all and despite her defects has demonstrated 
that she is able to take her place in almost any 
line with her more fortunate compeers. In her 
blindness she sees the beauty of the universe, 


198 


Backbone 


in her deafness she hears the music of the 
spheres through the ears of a contented mind 
and with her deft fingers she voices the emotions 
of her being and the happy thoughts that are 
hers. So far from bemoaning her fate, she 
would not exchange places with queens. 

Another great specimen of grit and deter¬ 
mined manhood were manifested in the states¬ 
man Jew,—Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards Lord 
Beaconsfield. Scoffed at in the House of Com¬ 
mons on account of his race, he hurled forth,— 
“The time will come when you will hear me,” 
and so it did. On another occasion, when at¬ 
tacked, he thus acknowledged and defended 
the faith of his race,—“Yes, I am a Jew, and 
when the ancestors of the honorable gentleman 
were savages in an unknown island mine were 
priests in the Temple.” With such qualities as 
that, you cannot keep a man down; he will make 
stepping-stones of stumbling blocks and cross 
the river of opposition to the bank of success. 
Imagine England’s surprise when the hated 
Jew became Prime Minister and got a seat on 
the wool-sack! 

Louisa M. Alcott fought poverty for twenty 
years, fighting it with splitting headaches, 
weary limbs and aching heart, but she made 
over $200,000 with her pen and cleared all the 


199 


The Strenuous Career 


family debts, even those outlawed. Her grit 
alone sustained her against ill-health. 

The story of successful men and women who 
sprang from an humble origin and had no oppor¬ 
tunity, save that which they made for them¬ 
selves, should put to shame the grumblers who 
complain of hard fortune and tell you they have 
no chance. 

Everybody has a chance, for everybody can 
make his or her own chance. Don’t fly off the 
track, keep steadily on and you will reach the 
goal. With Eobert Herrick say 


Tumble me down, and I will sit 
Upon my ruins, smiling yet; 

Tear me to tatters, yet I ’ll be 
Patient in my necessity; 

Laugh at my scraps of clothes and shun 
Me as a fear’d infection, 

Yet, scarecrow-like, I ’ll walk as one 
Neglecting thy derision. 


200 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE SUCCESSFUL MAN'S WIFE. 

Man and woman are like two shells of the 
oyster—they were made for each other. A 
crusty old bachelor, hearing that his friend had 
gone blind, said: “Let him marry and if that 
does not open his eyes, nothing else will.” But 
that sneer has been confuted by the experience 
of many blind scholars, like Hood, famous au¬ 
thority on bees, and Fawcett, political econo¬ 
mist at Cambridge and England’s most famous 
Postmaster-General, whose highly qualified 
wives were eyes indeed to their husbands. 

Many men think they are self-made who are 
really marriage-made. Napoleon won his great¬ 
est victories while Josephine was his wife and 
while he loved her. When our country’s inter¬ 
ests hung in the balance at Valley Forge, Mar¬ 
tha Washington hastened to her George and 
urged him on to victory. 

Whether a man shall be made or marred in 
marriage depends altogether on his choice of a 
wife. 

Don’t marry for beauty alone. Socrates 


201 


The Strenuous Career 


called beauty “a short-lived tyranny” and 
Theophrastus, “a silent cheat.” The man who 
marries for beauty alone is as silly as the man 
who would buy a house because it had fine flow¬ 
ers in the front yard. A beautiful woman 
pleases the eye, a good woman the heart. The 
one is a jewel, the other is a treasure. 

Look well to the temper of the girl you think 
of marrying. Socrates said he 4 ‘ married Xan- 
tippe and endured her for self-discipline.” Sol¬ 
omon, whose matrimonial experiences were 
rather multitudinous, had a different view of the 
matter: ‘ ‘ It is better to dwell in the corner of 
a house-top than with a brawling woman in a 
wide house.” 

The word—wife—means weaver, and wives 
either weave men’s fortunes, or, like moths, sim¬ 
ply feed upon them. Many a woman, by true 
sympathy, by thinking over what will do him 
good, has helped her husband on to highest suc¬ 
cess. Bismarck and Disraeli, who for thirty 
years were the controlling powers in European 
politics, said they owed their success to their 
wives. 

Woman’s quick intuition will give you more 
practical knowledge in an hour than man’s slow 
logic in years. Before you select a business part¬ 
ner introduce him to .your wife; get her opinion 


202 


The Successful Mm’s Wife 


as to his capacity and integrity. Lord Boling- 
broke said: “If I were making up a plan of con¬ 
sequence I should like first to consult with a 
sensible woman. ’ ’ A woman will often see 
what’s right and often do it before her husband 
has finished his deliberations. Make your home 
a cabinet room where all the affairs of the house¬ 
hold and of business come under comparison 
and advisal. Tell your wife how much money 
you have and no honorable woman will want 
to spend more than can be afforded. 

While many a man owes his prosperity to his 
wife’s wise administration of household affairs, 
it is also true that many a man’s financial straits 
can be traced to the wife’s love of vulgar dis¬ 
play, social rivalry or thoughtless extravagance, 
or perhaps incompetent management. When the 
husband of Victoria Colonna was offered the 
crown of Naples as an inducement to join the 
league against his sovereign, Charles V., she 
prevailed upon him to spurn the offer. Suppose 
that, dazzdled by the glitter of royalty, she had 
coaxed him to make her a queen, would he have 
refused the bribe ? He might, but he would have 
been one man in a million. 

That is what is going on in thousands of 
homes throughout our land. Women have their 
hearts set upon show, upon glitter, upon dress, 


203 


The Strenuous Career 


upon social distinction, upon surpassing some 
rival, upon more of the luxuries and splendors 
of wealth and are leading their husbands, un¬ 
consciously perhaps, to abandon their integrity 
for the sake of show. 

Marry a good housekeeper. The sentiment 
has become prevalent that a man must make 
his fortune before he marries, that his wife 
must have no sympathy or share with him in 
the pursuit of it, in which most of the pleasure 
truly consists. This is very unfortunate; it fills 
the country with bachelors who are waiting to 
make their fortunes, endangering virtue and 
promoting vice; it destroys the true economy 
and design of the domestic institution, encour¬ 
ages inefficiency among women, who are expect¬ 
ing to be taken up by fortune and passively sus¬ 
tained without any concern on their part. 

Just as it is a man’s duty to provide for his 
family, so it is a woman’s duty to adorn it with 
all the excellences and graces of good taste, and 
either by her own industry or the well-directed 
industry of those who serve her, to fill it with 
healthful influences of cleanliness, good order 
and neatness, so that everything may minister 
to the comfort and enjoyment of those she loves. 

The state of life into which it has pleased God 
to call our daughters is plainly, for the most 


204 


The Successful Man’s Wife 

part, that which entails the duties of the house¬ 
keeper and the home-maker, and for those du¬ 
ties the learning acquired in the schools often 
does much to unfit them. 

The result of this unfaithfulness in the foun¬ 
dation education is seen in the extravagant hab¬ 
its of our modern housekeeping, the ignorant 
waste where the young lady finds herself un¬ 
able to teach and direct her servants, in cases 
where she is not required to do the actual work 
herself, and wearying of her attempts to he 
queen of her own household, she allows her little 
kingdom to live without a head. Her husband 
finds that the expense of married life is far 
greater than he had anticipated and the comfort 
less. As the expenditures increase, he sees that 
his hard work on one side is, only to supply the 
means of wastefulness on the other side, and 
that his children are growing up with notions of 
life which nothing but continually increasing 
riches can satisfy. 

Even if a young woman be not required to do 
the work herself, she ought to be able to direct 
her servants. But a young wife may not be 
able to do all the work required to be done in 
the house. Notable! Not able to cook and wash 
and mend and clean the house for one young 
man and herself, and that young man her hus- 


205 


The Strenuous Career 


band, too, who is quite willing to work from 
morning until night, to put up with a cold lunch, 
to get up and light the fire, to do anything that 
love can contrive to spare her labor, conduce to 
her convenience and promote her happiness? 

Womanliness and good housekeeping go to¬ 
gether. Society requires of the man a certain 
training when he enters a profession where 
great issues are at stake, and men as a rule do 
master the business which they follow, and it 
should be equally as binding on a woman to mas¬ 
ter the details and proper care of a house. Mar¬ 
riages will increase when women make more of 
home. 

He cannot be an unhappy man who has the 
love and smile of a woman to accompany him in 
every department of life. The world may look 
dark and cheerless, but the little asylum of home, 
lighted up by love, will be more cheerful and 
bright. The successful man’s wife will make 
her husband feel that one day passed under his 
own roof is worth a thousand in any other place. 
A house may be a cold storage for costly furni¬ 
ture. A home must be warmed with the embers 
of love. Home is the miniature of heaven let 
down to shine in this world. 


206 


CHAPTEB XXVIII. 

SHAKESPEARE ON SUCCESS. 


.Give thy thoughts no tongue, 

Nor any unproportion’d thought its act. 

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. 

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, 
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel; 

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment 
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware 
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, 

Bear ’t that the opposed may be beware of thee. 
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; 

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment. 
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 

But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy; 

For the apparel oft proclaims the man. 


Shakespeare as the epitome of wisdom is a 
good guide, philosopher and friend. From his 
pages can be exhumed the choicest gems of 
thought, more valuable, if taken to heart and put 
into practice, than gold and diamonds and pre¬ 
cious stones. In every line there is a veritable 
mine scintillating with its precious treasures 
and these may be gathered by all if they have 
only the discernment to perceive them. Espe¬ 
cially in the play of Hamlet is Shakespeare at 
his best. Here we have the ripe sound fruitage of 
his manhood and experience; here we have the 


207 



The Strenuous Career 


golden nuggets scattered with a prodigal hand; 
here the choicest thoughts that ever came burn¬ 
ing from the brain of mortal. In the advice 
which Polonius gives to Laertes, Shakespeare 
gives the compendium of right thinking and 
good living. To think aright is everything. 
Thought rules the world as applied action, every 
accomplishment is the result of thought. 

The steam engine is a fanciful ethereal 
thought, wrought out in iron and steel, trem¬ 
bling with the power of steam within, but heated 
first of all from the fires of the brain. 

The greatest works of art are but thought 
realized and concentrated. The great dome of 
St, Peter’s in Eome was first in the narrower 
dome that covered the brow of Michel Angelo. 

All the great achievements in the world today 
are simply thought crystallized. 

In the Luray caverns in Virginia, or the great 
Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, you can see enor¬ 
mous pillars which have been formed by the 
steady dropping of water from the roof of the 
cavern. This masonry, formed of solid rock 
made by the slow and silent processes of nature 
is truly marvelous. A single drop of water, 
finding its way from the surface down through 
the roof of the cave, deposits its* sediment and 
another follows it, and another, and still an- 


208 


Shakespeare on Success 

other, each adding its imperceptible contribu¬ 
tion, until the icicle of stone begins to grow, and, 
ultimately reaching the rock beneath, becomes 
a massive pillar that shall stand for thousands 
of years. 

There is a process, just as that, going on in 
every one of our hearts. Each thought that 
stirs for a moment only one single drop of water, 
with its limestone deposit from the roof of the 
cavern, sinks into the soul and all unconsciously 
makes its deposit, other thoughts follow, and yet 
others, until a habit of thought along a given 
line of reasoning, arousing similar emotions is 
formed, erecting within our hearts monuments 
of purpose or pillars of ambition that have to do 
with our characters forever. 

Character is the result of thought ; think high 
and you will live high. You can surround your¬ 
self with brightness and cheer or encompass 
yourself in gloom and misery. Whether your life 
shall be full, and complete as the Creator in¬ 
tended, or empty and void, altogether depends 
upon yourself. In a word, you can make of life 
either a success or failure; the fashioning of it 
lies in your own hands. 

Not only will right thinking bring right living 
to yourself, but it will also influence others and 
draw them to you with a magnetic attraction. 


£09 


The Strenuous Career 


It will bring you friends and as Shakespeare 
says,—“the friends thou hast, and their adop¬ 
tion tried, grapple them to thy soul with hooks 
of steel. ’’ Friendship is one of the most beauti¬ 
ful things in the world; it makes, the waters of 
life sweet and soothing and restful to the wear¬ 
ied spirit. No one is poor who can truly say 
he has a friend. When Charles Kingsley was 
asked the secret of his success, he replied,— 
“I had a friend.” Xavier De Maistre in that 
beautiful masterpiece of his—'“A Journey 
Round My Room,” says,—'“I had once a friend, 
he was only my neighbor’s dog, yet he was a 
friend and I appreciated him. ’ ’ If canine friend¬ 
ship cap be thus valued, how much more should 
that warm human sympathy be prized which 
flows from the channels of a faithful, loving 
heart. Make friends if you can, the more the 
better, for them and for yourself. God intended 
that we should all be brothers, that we should 
love one another even as He loves us, but human 
nature is weak and the divine precept is often 
forgotten. Sometimes hate lurks in the heart 
from which it has turned out love. Envy, jeal¬ 
ousy, rivalry, greed, covetousness,—these are 
the furies that sometimes gnaw the breasts of 
men, torturing them so as to make them hate 
their kind, and spurring them on, to en- 


210 


Shakespeare on Success 


deavor to hurl virtue from her pedestal and set 
up vice in her place. These deformed harpies 
so prey on their victims that they lose all sense 
of moral honor and resort to falsehood and 
calumnies to injure their neighbors. The best 
of men are not free from their attacks, and no 
man, therefore, need live in the fool’s paradise 
of thinking that he has no enemies, for he has 
and he should he grateful, not annoyed, at hav¬ 
ing them, inasmuch as enmity is but a tribute to 
worth. All really good and great men have ene¬ 
mies, you have probably seen regal looking New¬ 
foundland dogs and St. Bernards,—noble ani¬ 
mals, walkingalong the streets with mongrels 
yelping at their tails, hut did the Newfound¬ 
lands or St. Bernards give any attention to 
them? Not at all,—with a look of contempt on 
their handsome faces they passed along, deem¬ 
ing their annoyers unworthy of notice. 

A forceful man, of a necesity has just about 
as many friends as enemies, they are equally 
divided and both testify to his merit, the one 
class by love, the other by hate. 

Of course every one is open to criticism, and 
Ithe man of parts welcomes it, for it shows him 
the danger spots and points out the unguarded 
gaps in the enclosure that surrounds him. No 
time man wants maudlin flattery, every one has 


211 


The Strenuous Career 


defects and ’tis a friend and not an enemy who 
points out these defects. Only a weakling or a 
fool is looking for compliments. The wise man 
will not pay a cent for a bushel of compliments, 
hut he is willing to pay well for one piece of hon¬ 
est criticism which will mirror him as he really 
is and not flatter him with a picture of which he 
is not the original. 

A good way to treat enemies is to show them 
such consideration as if they were some day to 
be your friends. Be courteous with them, as 
with everybody. Manners oft proclaim the man, 
and, in addition to manners, personal appear¬ 
ance, for as Shakespeare conveys, apparel has 
much to do with success in life. Many a one of 
merit has been rejected because of carelessness 
in dress. On the other hand, overdress or what 
is known as “loudness of display” is just as 
bad, even worse, for it shows the fop and the 
dude, synonymous terms for numbskull. Very 
often a very little thing in a man’s personal ap¬ 
pearance works irretrievably against him. 

Beware of debt. Debt wrinkles the face, cor¬ 
rugates the brow and makes the skin callous. 
Of decent people it makes dishonest people and 
it leads from the path of truth to that of false¬ 
hood. 

When a man owes you a dollar he owes you a 


212 


Shakespeare on Success 


grudge also. It is very easy to borrow, but very 
hard to pay back. Franklin says,—'“ debtors 
have very short memories”—and by the same 
analogy it could be said that creditors have very 
long ones. 

Be true to yourself and “it will follow, as the 
night the day, thou canst not then be false to any 
man.” Be what you are, perform what you 
promise, let your word be your bond, stand fast, 
cling to the right, depise the wrong, and obey 
the laws of your being, faithful to yourself, to 
your fellows and to your God. 


> 


213 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

SUCCESS VIA THE GRAND STAND. 

Under the caption “Do You Follow the 
Track V 9 there appeared a cartoon in one of our 
dailies which should find a place in larger form 
and more attractive colors in every office, store, 
shop, factory and mercantile establishment in 
the land, on every dead wall, plank and pump 
and scatfolding for all to see and take to heart 
the warning it conveys and the lesson it teaches; 
yea, it should find a place too, in every home 
side by side with the family pictures, to instil 
into youthful minds what may be expected from 
the vice of gambling, especially race track gam¬ 
bling. The picture does credit to the brain and 
heart and hand of the artist who conceived it. It 
would be well if the schools and colleges would 
accentuate and emphasize to the rising genera¬ 
tion the moral lesson of this cartoon, for such 
would be of more use to them than some of the 
fads and fancies of educational beauty which 
find places in the curriculum of to-day. The 
conception must be seen to be thoroughly ap¬ 
preciated. 


214 


Success Via the Grand Stand 


Here, however, is a description: A young 
man is represented, typical of the better class 
of wage earners, the refined, intelligent, culti¬ 
vated, educated class who are the very back¬ 
bone and stamina of the nation’s greatness. He 
is well-dressed, in accord with the fashion of his 
station in life and his step is buoyant, indicating 
that the young blood is bounding healthily 
through his veins. The face is handsome, the 
nose long and aquiline, the eye bright and keen, 
the jaw square, showing that he has the fighting 
grip to make his way in the world, the lips are 
thin, proving determination of purpose, yet the 
mouth is in a half smile, the index of an hon¬ 
est, frank, kindly nature. On the whole it is 
a good face and a good head. He is on his way 
to the race track, the way that so many others 
have traveled in sublime unconsciousness that 
it was directly leading them to the portal of dis¬ 
honor, disgrace, the loss of money and the loss 
of manhood. In the right hand the young man 
carries his earnings, the fruition of his honest 
toil, and in his left is the form sheet, or in the 
vernacular of the track the “dope sheet,” which 
he is very intently studying in order to make up 
his mind what horse is the best chance on which 
to bet his money—the money that should go to 
the support of an aged mother or father, who 


215 


The Strenuous Career 


gave him an education and equipped him for the 
battle of life, or perhaps go to a fond young wife 
who trusted her all to his keeping and is looking 
to him to support, not alone herself, but the 
little ones that heaven will send to her keeping, 
or which he could put by for the rainy day that 
is sure to come, sooner or later, to everyone, 
when there will be no longer sunshine in which 
to work. In the distance can be seen the grand 
stand for which he is heading, the flag on its cu¬ 
pola fluttering gaily in the breeze as if waving a 
welcome to the poor dupes and fools to come on 
and worship at the shrine of the fickle goddess 
of Luck. If every pew (box) in that shrine 
could tell a tale what a story would be unfolded 1 
—one “ whose lightest word would harrow up 
the soul,” a story more sensational and inten¬ 
sive than any ever conceived by the lurid brain 
of a dime novelist. It would tell of ruined homes 
and cold firesides where comfort and love used 
to sit side by side in the genial warmth of holy 
union, where the merry laugh betokened the 
happy heart, where peace and contentment held 
sway, where kind words fell like the droppings 
of manna to soothe and refresh and nourish. 

It would tell of broken lives hurled on the 
wayside to be trampled in the mud of shame and 
dishonor, of the stinging blow instead of the 


216 


Success Via the Grand Stand 

kiss of love, of the blasphemous oath instead of 
the prayer of praise. 

It would tell of the deserted wife whose arms 
once clasped a devoted husband’s neck in the 
embrace of affection, hut who now sits in the 
darkness of sorrow wasting her heart in sighs 
and wishing for death to give her surcease from 
shame. 

It would tell of Despair snatching the crown 
of ambition from the brow of youth and placing 
thereon the blackened cap of infamy, of careers 
shattered to fragments and tossed into the 
seething waters of shame, of the agonizing 
^shriek of countless victims as they topple into 
suicides’ graves—it would tell of all these things 
and more. 

Such would be some of the awful confessions 
of the Grand Stand to which our friend in the 
picture is making his way. He is now in the sun¬ 
light of sanguine anticipation; he does not see 
behind him the gathering clouds that swish and 
swirl; portending the coming storm, and from 
which even the rooks are flying to retreats of 
safety; above all is he unconscious of the three 
hideous, horrible jackals, rather monsters bear¬ 
ing down on him from out the storm. On they 
rush, with foam-flecked jowls and fearsome 
fangs, ready to tear and rend the quivering flesh 


217 


The Strenuous Career 


of their victim, but he wots not of their prox¬ 
imity, though the sanguinary carniverous beast 
of Debt is almost at his heels. Soon it will be on 
him with scorching, withering, blighting breath, 
lacerating him with its sharp incisors; Theft 
will dash on to partake of the feast and finally 
Ruin will make the spring to gobble up what is 
left of the poor victim. Alas! that he should 
be -unconscious of his terrible doom! 

The same fate is awaiting every young man 
who indulges the fatal passion of race-track 
betting. Instead of being on the sunny road to 
success, by way of the grand stand, he is surely 
treading the avenues that lead to the dripping 
jaws of the three monsters of Debt, Theft and 
Ruin. 

No one can beat the races; as well search for 
the elusive pea under the thimble in the game 
of “Thimble-Rigging,” or try to get the best of 
loaded dice. For a time the “bookies” are the 
only ones that make money, but in the end the 
monster of ruin catches them too, illustrating 
well the old Spanish proverb that whatever 
comes over the devil’s back goes under his belly 
again. 

A young man starts out with the highest 
hopes. He has heard of fortunes won at the 
race track and his fervid imagination becomes 


218 


Success Via the Grand Stand 

so fired, that he is easily lured on to the inevi¬ 
table doom that is the common lot of all turf 
followers. By the merest chance he may win, 
but such a fluke of fortune comes seldom. The 
dope of the track is everywhere visible; touts 
and heelers are on the lookout [to inveigle vic¬ 
tims into their master’s nets, and it is not King 
Horse but King Dishonesty that rules at the 
track. 

Our young man gets into debt, he cannot hon¬ 
estly pay back and to satiate his passion he re¬ 
sorts to theft. He loses all moral backbone and 
one speculation leads to another, sin is heaped 
on sin, crime upon crime, until in the end he is 
found out and thrown to the beast of Ruin 
which devours his character and reputation with 
all avidity, and so he sinks down beneath the 
social surface, lost to himself, lost to his friends, 
lost to the world and his epitaph is carved not 
in the golden letters of Honor or Success, but the 
blackened characters of Disgrace and Failure. 


219 


CHAPTER XXX. 

THE FAILURE OF SUCCESS. 

I am a strong admirer of success, but not in 
the popular conception, which estimates it 
merely from a monetary standard. Emerson 
says,—“Talleyrand’s question is ever the main 
one; not,—Is he rich? Has he this or that fac¬ 
ulty? Is he of the establishment,?—but,—‘Is he 
anybody? Hoes he stand for something?” 

This is the question which is the comprehen¬ 
sive inquiry of a man’s life,—Hoes he stand for 
something? Hoes he represent honor, truth, 
manhood, is his name synonymous with integ¬ 
rity and square dealing and is he entitled to the 
respect and confidence of his fellow-men? A 
man with such requirements is a success though 
he were as poor as Job. The man who has no 
money may be poor, but the man who has noth¬ 
ing but money is the poorest thing in all the 
world. The man who has nothing but money to 
leave behind him should be ashamed of his life 
and afraid to die. Better be a man rich than 
merely a rich man. It is absurd to call a man 
successful because he has a plethoric purse,— 


220 


The Failure of Success 

he may be the rankest of failures. Good name 
is above riches. As the great master has it:— 

Good name in man and woman, dear, 

Is the immediate jewel of their souls— 

Who steals my purse, steals trash— 

’Twas mine, ’tis his and has been slave to thousands, 

But he who filches from me mv good name, 

Bobs me of that which not ei^lches him, 

And makes me poor indeed. 

Character is the standard of a man, not gold 
and silver. Nor can the attainment of an end 
or aim, the fulfilment of a desire or the realiza¬ 
tion of ambition be termed success. Would you 
call a horse jockey a success because he can get 
his horse a length ahead in a three mile course, 
keep his advantage and come under the ribbon 
a winner? No doubt he gets big money for his 
skill in steering the animal to victory, but it is 
really the horse that wins. Would you call the 
promoter of some gigantic scheme to fleece the 
public a success, who cleared out of the under¬ 
taking with millions, while the poor dupes he 
had inveigled into it were ruined? Surely such 
success cannot be the goal of a self-respecting 
man; decency despises it and honesty shuns it. 

Perhaps the most “successful” man in my 
community is a race-track gambler, a book¬ 
maker ; he has the finest house, the best automo¬ 
biles, and of course, blooded horses, but who can 


221 


The Strenuous Career 

frankly admire such success ? With this kind of 
success he cannot enter the homes of those who 
are far beneath him in money and power, but 
infinitely above him in character and worth. 

“Worth makes the man and want of it the 
fellow . 9 9 

Success lies not in getting what you desire, 
hut in achieving that which will elevate and en¬ 
noble yourself and at the same time confer some 
benefit on your kind,—a success which will be 
measured by its contribution to the world’s wel¬ 
fare and happiness. The personal worth of any 
one consists in the good he is able to do to oth¬ 
ers, if he lives only for himself he had better be 
dead, as far as the world is concerned, for he 
contributes nothing to its progress, only takes 
from it by a selfish existence. 

There are many who by self-denial, compas¬ 
sion, patience, benignity, charity and love en¬ 
rich the world silently, unostentatiously, and 
pass on to an eternal reward without any tem¬ 
poral acknowledgment, forgotten even in death, 
while the millions are fawning in servile syco¬ 
phancy on the trust magnate whose wealth is 
not enriching the world, but rather making it 
poorer by depriving those who would use the 
money to good advantage. Money is often 
squandered on frivolous pursuits. Plutocrats 
222 








THE FAILURE OF SUCCESS. 

WORRY AND DISCONTENT IN THE MIDST OF LUXURY. 




















































































































































































































































































































































The Failure of Success 


are lavishing millions on women of society 
whose fads are to give monkey dinners and 
drive goose tandems to fritter away their time 
and draw the attention of the crowd for the 
passing moment. Such women are wealthy, 
that is, they have wealth heaped upon them, but 
who would be rash enough or foolish enough to 
call them successes? Contrast them with the 
Salvation Army lassies and the Sisters of Char¬ 
ity,—good women whose lives are a litany of 
love and service, who go down to the depths and 
try to rescue fallen humanity and bring it up to 
the sunny heights of hope and usefulness. Such 
women are making the world brighter and bet¬ 
ter, and they are respected everywhere they go, 
for all know their mission of self-denial for the 
lifting up of the unfortunate. Their success is 
not measured by money, but by the amount of 
good they can accomplish in the world. 

What the multitude is pleased to call success 
the individual may regard in a very different 
light. Oh, if you could only follow our “suc¬ 
cessful” speculators and operators and depre¬ 
dators into their secret chambers where their 
hearts weep alone and their eyes look into the 
mirror of truth reflected from their own guilty 
souls, you would shudder at their self-abase¬ 
ment and instead of envying them their wealth, 


223 


The Strenuous Career 


you would pity their wretchedness and thank 
God you had escaped the burden of their mil¬ 
lions. 

We have no where deprecated enterprise and 
energy by which the wealth of the community 
is enlarged, its knowledge extended and its prac¬ 
tical conveniences increased, but, on the con¬ 
trary, we have always encouraged these quali¬ 
ties. The wheels of industry must revolve if 
the nation would go round. Up and doing must 
be the motto adopted, if the front rank would be 
reached; doing with a fixed, immovable purpose, 
and, while keeping in mind the materialistic 
ideals, the question, what effect has successful 
labor on the soul?—must also be considered. A 
soul in amassing wealth or even extending the 
boundaries of knowledge is ill employed, essen¬ 
tially a failure, if in the process it is destroyed. 

There are men who have the alchemic power 
to turn whatever they touch into gold; it is the 
alpha and omega of their every action, they 
think it, they dream it, they talk of nothing else. 
To them the columns of the money market are 
more interesting than the Bible, they work like 
slaves and slaves indeed they are to their own 
lust for gain. If reminded of,—“Lay up for 
yourselves treasures in heaven, ,,! they take 
refuge under the precept,—“Be not slothful in 


224 


The Failure of Success 


business.” As merchant princes they are suc¬ 
cesses, as solid foundations for commercial 
prosperity they are successes, but as souls they 
are failures,—they have gradually dried up un¬ 
til all the juices are gone, and nothing remains 
but the thin, fierce lust of accumulation. Take 
one of these men and analyze his character; you 
will find that all the better instincts have been 
crushed, that he has become hard and dry, im¬ 
pervious to the sufferings and sorrows of others, 
cold, cruel, calculating, the milk of human 
kindness pressed out of his system and in its 
place vinegar; instead of warm, red blood, in his 
veins flows ice-water. He is a very busy man, 
in fact you cannot describe how busy he is,—he 
calls to mind the question addressed to the poet, 
Southey, by the Quaker lady. The eccentric 
poet had been relating, in his own enthusiastic 
way, how he had studied Portuguese grammar 
while shaving, read Spanish for an hour before 
breakfast, after breakfast wrote and studied 
until dinner, after dinner filled the remainder of 
the day with reading, writing, talking and taking 
exercise. “ And friend, when dost thee think?” 
inquired the quiet voice. 

It would seem that God was severely kind to 
these successful men. Sweden has never recov¬ 
ered from the audaciously successful career of 


225 


The Strenuous Career 


Charles XII. Fired with the glory of one vic¬ 
tory, that monarch went on to another, and while 
many were brilliant all were ineffectual, bring¬ 
ing no good to Europe in general, hut lasting 
harm to Sweden in particular. His victory over 
the Russians at Narva was his ruin. Had he 
been defeated there he would have gone home to 
govern well his own country and develop her 
resources, but ambition lured him on to plunge 
his people into difficulties and danger. 

Many a life has staked its all on a delusive 
Narva and gone down to defeat and ruin. 

Success in public life, especially in politics, is 
often purchased at a dear cost,—the loss of man¬ 
hood, utter subservience to venality and corrup¬ 
tion. It is purchased even in church life, too, by 
a compromise with evil. 

It is written: ‘ 4 Go to now, ye rich, weep and 
howl, the hire of laborers which is of you kept 
back by fraud, crieth out . 9 9 On such a founda¬ 
tion, too often, is reared the power of wealth,— 
the great corporations, the vast businesses, the 
prosperous firms, the large estates and the pa¬ 
latial mansions, and the jugglers of the immense 
fortunes grown sleek and fat, are respected by 
the people and pass on to honored graves; pan¬ 
egyrics are preached, eulogiums written and on 
their tombstones is carved “success ,’ 9 but be- 


226 


The Failure of Success 


hind the gates of Death flashes a vindictive 
sword which will avenge the wrongs of earth. 
“The abundance that he has gathered has per¬ 
ished. ’’ Only good deeds are stored in the heav¬ 
enly treasure-house “where neither moth nor 
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not 
break through and steal.” 

Success can flourish only on a good soil; what 
appears to thrive on barren ground is only a 
spurious plant, a counterfeit of the real, like a 
weed that may be mistaken for a wholesome 
vegetable in the garden. A toadstool and a 
mushroom appear very like; the one is a deadly 
poison, the other is a succulent edible. 

The author sometimes depends for his success 
on the poison of literature which he sows broad¬ 
cast on the leading avenues of the world as well 
as in the bye-ways and which fructifies into a 
soul-destroying harvest; he drenches every line 
with moral filth, making the whole a seething 
cess-pool the odors of which contaminate all who 
approach, yet the man who writes such a poison¬ 
ous novel is called a success, but better for the 
scandal-monger “that a mill-stone were hung 
about his neck and he be cast into the depths of 
the sea.” 

Then, there is success in society,—how is it 
gained? Often by the loss of all that makes life 


227 


The Strenuous Career 


really worth living, but in most cases it is solely 
measured by the gold standard, and virtue, 
honor and truth and all that adorn character 
and elevate the species, are left out of consider¬ 
ation. If a woman has the means to wear an 
extra string of pearls or a tiara of diamonds she 
is voted a Queen of Society; thousands fawn 
upon her and her doings are chronicled in the 
fashionable journals; if a man has just sense 
enough to make a fool of himself by fads and 
fancies, by putting on airs and aping the dress 
and manners of an effete royalty, he is hailed 
as a King of Society; but are such a vain Queen 
and such a foolish King a success? What is 
this so-called society? Compared with the 
whole, it is made up of a few silly-headed indi¬ 
viduals who have been born with golden spoons 
in their mouths, or to whom fate or chance has 
given some windfall in the shape of money. 
Neither brains nor merit, only a golden key can 
open its portals. Its members, however, are 
merely the parasites of humanity,—they suck 
the blood and give nothing in return. Thank 
God society is exclusive, that there are only 
“400” drones to waste the money made by the 
working bees; if there were more, they would 
destroy all the honey and the world would die 
of starvation, yet it is into this “society” that 


The Failure of Success 


many of our millionaires are trying to enter in 
order to attract attention to themselves and 
squander their money, or rather other people’s 
money, on foolishness and frivolity and, very 
often, sin. If money cannot be made to serve a 
more useful end, can the life that has been spent 
in accumulating it be called a success? 

As there is success which is failure, so there 
is a failure which is success. Was Columbus a 
failure because he was neglected and starved? 
Did Cromwell fail, though his bleached bones 
were buried among the outcasts? Was Mozart 
a failure because he died penniless and sleeps 
in an unknown grave? There is no failure for 
the good and wise. No man fails who lives for 
the glory of God and the betterment of man. 
No man can call his life a success who has not 
felt, and acted accordingly, that his life belongs 
to the race, and that, which God has given him, 
He gave for the good of all. 

A distinguished writer has recently said: 
“The great problem which the present century 
will have to take in hand seriously and finally 
solve is this,—‘Are rich men likely to be of any 
social use, or will it be better to abolish the in¬ 
stitution?’ If we believe in Darwinism it will 
not be hard to trace the pedigree of those who 
spend millions on the costliest food, finest 


229 


The Strenuous Career 


clothes, most expensive jewelry, palatial man¬ 
sions, fastest horses, rarest wines and handsom¬ 
est women, and then leave millions, more than is 
safe or just, to their children, while millions of 
the poor are shivering in the cold, perishing with 
hunger, having not a burial place—millions suf¬ 
fering in ignorance and sin, all over the world, 
for the lack of that very money. 

Money-making is not the highest success. The 
soul coined into dollars is one in which every 
holy emotion is strangled and every noble as¬ 
piration stifled. I do not wonder we have so 
many dishonored bankrupts, fraudulent clerks, 
defaulting cashiers and absconding partners; 
the wonder is that there are so few when even 
good men regard poverty as a crime. We seem 
to have no standard to measure men except by 
the length of their purses. 

Capital is not what a man has, but what a 
man is. Character is capital. The value of 
character is the standard of human progress. 
Wherever character is made a secondary ob¬ 
ject, sensualism will prevail. He who lives for 
anything less than character is not worthy of 
being called a man. Better be a man than merely 
a millionaire. Win success bravely, but do not 
exaggerate its worth. Seek wealth, not as a 
means for the larger gratification of your lower 


230 


The Failure of Success 


instincts, but, maintaining the supremacy of 
your noblest nature, seek riches that you may 
thereby make the world better and happier and 
thus make your ‘ 4 life, death and the vast for¬ 
ever, one grand sweet song.” 


231 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

THE TKAGEDIES OF SUCCESS. 

Success does not depend on mighty achieve¬ 
ments. Some of our most distinguished men, 
indeed those who have carved their names high¬ 
est on the pinnacle of fame, from a worldly 
standpoint, were tragic failures. The world’s 
three greatest poets, Homer, Dante and Shake¬ 
speare,—the sublime trinity of intellect—all 
were wretched men. Homer was blind and sang 
his snatches of undying song from door to door 
in ancient Greece, begging bread in return; 
Dante was a wanderer over Italy, hungry most 
of the time and without food for days; Shake¬ 
speare was little above a vagrant and in all his 
life scarcely had one sixpence to rub against 
another. 

It was the same with many of the great au¬ 
thors. The most successful were abjectedly 
poor. The greatest romance ever penned, Cer¬ 
vantes’ “Don Quixote” was written when its 
author had not one peso, and moreover was on 
a bed of pain. The sublimest allegory of the 
English language is “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” 


232 




The Tragedies of Success 

Bunyan was a traveling tinker who never 
earned more than half a crown (60 cents) a day 
in his life; his great work, too, was written on 
the untwisted papers that were used to cork the 
bottles of milk brought to his cell while a pris¬ 
oner in Bedford jail, where he was incarcerated 
on account of his religious principles. 

In Johnson’s day nearly all the successful 
writers were half-starved. One day they would 
be going down Piccadilly in stove-pipe hats, pat¬ 
ent leathers, and swallow-tail coats, the next day 
they would be lying in bed because their clothes 
were in pawn. Goldsmith was starving in a gar¬ 
ret, when Johnson came in and rummaging 
through an old drawer in the dilapidated room 
discovered the MS. of “The Vicar of Wake¬ 
field,” which he sold for £10 (50 dollars) and 
saved the poor author from dying of cold and 
hunger. In our time, when some of our authors 
can command a dollar a word, and whose copy¬ 
rights sell for from $10,000 to $50,000, such a 
work would probably make its author a rich 
man. Goldsmith also wrote several histories and 
some of the most beautiful poems ever penned, 
but he never had a pound note in his life that 
he could really call his own. He wandered over 
Europe playing tunes on a tin whistle for the 
peasantry as he went along, and they, in return, 
shared with him their frugal fare. 


233 


The Strenuous Career 


Many great inventors have made their lives 
successful for the world while struggling to 
make both ends meet, and often could not do it, 
and went down to the grave sad and disap¬ 
pointed men. 

Columbus was a poor man, his great discov¬ 
ery, though successful, did not enrich him and 
he died broken-hearted and in ignorance of his 
achievement, that he had found a new world. 

But had any of these men had wealth they 
would have been as badly off. Wealth cannot 
satisfy the soul. A man dining with Rothschild, 
the great banker, said,—“You must he a thor¬ 
oughly happy man. n He replied: “Happy? Me 
happy? Happy, when just as I am going to dine, 
a man sends me a note, saying,—‘If you don’t 
send me five hundred pounds before tomorrow 
night, I will blow your brains out’—me happy? ’ ’ 
William H. Vanderbilt, three hundred times a 
millionaire, died in a fit of apoplexy brought on 
because he could not come to an agreement with 
Robert Garret about a railroad. Stephen Girard 
said,—“I live the life of a galley-slave; when I 
rise in the morning my one effort is to work so 
hard that I can sleep when it gets to be night. 
How many of the millionaires of our day are 
happy, are contented? Not one. Many of them 
would be glad to change places with the hum- 


234 


The Tragedies of Success 

blest of their servants, and some of them, dearly 
as they love money, and eagerly as they pursue 
it, would give a king’s ransom for the strong 
limbs and robust health of a common day- 
laborer. What good is a million dollars to a 
man who can’t eat a “square” meal? The cast¬ 
away mariner is in an agony of thirst, though 
surrounded by an ocean of water. 

i ‘Life is a long fatigue,” wrote Talleyrand 
on his eighty-first birthday. Lord Eldon, an¬ 
other spoiled child of fortune said,—“A few 
weeks and I shall escape to the country and find 
a short resting place between vexation and the 
grave. ’ ’ 

The cares, the worry, the incessant strain en¬ 
tailed upon a man of millions far more than 
counterbalance the pleasure he derives from 
their possession; in fact, happiness for him is 
a negative quantity and comfort is at the van¬ 
ishing point. 

The indulgment of worldly pleasure can 
never bring peace to the mind, nor consolation 
to the soul. The words of Solomon find an echo 
in the hearts of most men: “The eye is not sat¬ 
isfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with 
hearing.” The world exhausted itself on 
Solomon, but all its blandishments could not 
soothe his soul. “Whatever my eyes desired I 


235 


The Strenuous Career 


refused them not,” said he, hut was he content, 
was he satisfied? Let him give the answer,—“I 
saw in all things vanity and vexation of mind, 
and that nothing was lasting under the sun.” 

Thackeray won the world’s applause by his 
genius,—did it fill the longings of his heart? In 
a Paris restaurant he gazes at the other end of 
the room and wonders who the pale, forlorn, 
wretched-looking creature is who returns his 
stare. He rises and finds ’tis his own reflection 
in the wall mirror. 

Many a novelist has made us laugh at the 
comicality of his situations, many a poet has 
whiled away the time pleasantly which other¬ 
wise would have been heavy and dull, yet they 
could not make themselves laugh or lighten their 
time by an ounce of enjoyment We sometimes 
on the stage see the masks of smiling faces cov¬ 
ering broken hearts, the rippling laugh of forced 
merriment smothering the sigh of despair. The 
same thing happens on the stage of men and 
women of everyday life. Great accomplish¬ 
ments often turn into Dead Sea fruit for those 
who perform them, and the wealth that has 
taken a lifetime to amass becomes ashes in the 
mouth. And what is fame? 

“A fancied life in others’ breath— 

A thing beyond us, e ’en before our death. ’ ’ 


236 


The Tragedies of Success 

Very often it is half disfame, for between it 
and notoriety there is only the thinnest of paper 
walls. ’Tis but a step from the sublime to the 
ridiculous, and fame and disgrace can be 
brought together in a twinkling. The late Mr. 
Parnell was worshipped as a god almost by the 
Irish people, yet in an hour he fell from the 
zenith of fame to the nadir of disgrace, so that 
none would do him honor. 

And fame brings its own responsibilities,—it 
is the shaft for malice, the target for envy, the 
butt of calumny, and the barbs of spite and 
jealousy are being constantly hurled upon it. 
Many a man has cause to regret the day when he 
became an object for popular enthusiasm, and 
may well say:— 


* 1 Sweet were the days when I was all unknown, 

But when my name was lifted up, the storm 
Broke on the mountain, and I cared not for it. ’ ’ 

Hogarth, at the height of his artistic glory, 
was driven almost mad because the painting he 
had dedicated to the king, did not please him; 
George II. cried out,—“Who is this Hogarth? 
Take this trumpery out of my presence.” Sher¬ 
idan, idol of his day, had for his last words,— 
“I am absolutely undone.” “Take me hack to 
my room,” sighed Sir Walter Scott, “there is 
237 


The Strenuous Career 


no rest for me but the grave. ’ ’ Lamb said,— 44 1 
walk up and down thinking I am happy, but 
feeling I am not.” Edmund Burke said he 
would not give a peck of refuse wheat for all 
the fame in the world. 

Napoleon, conqueror of Europe, died lonely 
and neglected on the rocky islet of St. Helena; 
all his victories ended but in defeat, all his suc¬ 
cesses amounted to failure. 

Alexander sat down and cried because he had 
no more worlds to conquer. Cyrus the Persian, 
begged for a pitiful monument to tell to poster¬ 
ity that he had been king of his country. 

Emperors and kings, popes and princes, sur¬ 
rounded by the glow of fame and at the very 
height of success and power have longed to get 
away from all and be at rest. “Uneasy lies the 
head that wears a crown,” wrote Shakespeare. 

When Andrew Jackson was President, a man 
called at the White House to see him; he sent in 
a message; the President came not; a second 
and a third message was sent. At length the 
President came out and in great indignation 
said to those in waiting,—“Gentlemen, people 
envy me in this White House and they long to 
get here, but I tell you, at the end of the second 
term, I am glad to get out of it, for it is a per¬ 
fect hell.” Do you imagine that the great heart 


238 


The Tragedies of Success 

of Abraham Lincoln ever found a moment’s 
happiness in the White House? And military 
glory? Grant was the most successful soldier 
of the 19th century, twice President of the 
United States, yet his cup was not full, for he 
desired more money for his family, and to get 
it, behold him on the summit of Mt. MacGregor 
drawing his pen, now mightier than the sword, 
keeping death at bay six months, while he 
snatched from the jaws of death the crowning 
victory of his matchless career. And yet Grant 
who had everything that life could give died 
prematurely old, unhappy, discouraged and 
beaten. 

Man is never satisfied. His soul is like Noah’s 
wandering dove,—a restless seeker after rest. 

Why is it that the world can never quiet man’s 
restless spirit? Why is it impossible for 
earthly things to fill up the void in his heart? 
Does it not show that man was made for that 
which the world cannot give? 


* 1 The soul on earth is an immortal guest, 

Compelled to starve at an unreal feast, 

A spark which upwards tends by nature’s force; 
A stream divided from its parent source; 

A drop, dissevered from the boundless sea; 

A moment, parted from eternity; 

A pilgrim, panting for the rest to come; 

An exile, anxious for his native home. ’ 1 


239 



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